Merciless Gods

by Christos Tsiolkas

A collection of urgent, thrilling and original stories from the award-winning, bestselling author of The Slap and Barracuda.

Love, sex, death, family, friendship, betrayal, tenderness, sacrifice and revelation...

This incendiary collection of stories from acclaimed writer Christos Tsiolkas takes you deep into worlds both strange and familiar, and introduces you to characters that will haunt you long after you have turned the final page.

• ISBN10: 1322527717
• ISBN13: 9781322527710
• Publish Date: 1 January 2014
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 12 May 2015
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Atlantic Books (UK)
• Format: eBook
• Language: English

Reviews

[Michael @ Knowledge Lost]

As most people know, I am a big fan of transgressive fiction and in Australia there is one author that doesn’t shy away from a touch or taboo subject. This author is Christos Tsiolkas and he is best known for his two recent novels The Slap and Barracuda. Merciless Gods is his first collection of short stories and deals mainly with sexuality, family and identity.

Author of six novels, Christos Tsiolkas was born in 1965 to Greek immigrant parents. Reading through his novels you quickly get the sense of what it must have been like growing up in suburbia as a Greek immigrant and a homosexual. He likes to explore these themes constantly and you get an idea of just how backwards people’s thinking can be. Then with his breakout novel The Slap, he challenged everyone’s thoughts, tapping into the universal dilemma around discipline and child-rearing.

Merciless Gods seems to be more of a “return to his roots” collection of short stories, which shares similarities with first novel Loaded at any of his other. There is this whole theme about social and personal struggle that play out within these stories. I am impressed with the way Tsiolkas challenges people’s views; particularly when it comes to sexuality and immigrants. There was a particular story that he wrote in Greek and then translated into English that was very powerful.

Christos Tsiolkas has officially become an ‘auto-buy’ author for me now and I will have to read the rest of his backlist sometime soon. Merciless Gods is hard-hitting and not for the faint of heart, he is pushing the boundaries but he does this really well. I am not sure when these stories were originally written, I think that will be interesting to know. However if you have never read this great Australian author, this is probably not the best place to start. Maybe begin with The Slap or Barracuda before working your way up to Loaded and Merciless Gods.

This review originally appeared on my blog: http://literary-exploration.com/2014/12/13/merciless-gods-by-christos-tsiolkas/