From the international bestselling and Booker Prize nominated author of The Slap comes a blazingly brilliant new novel.

Winner of the 2006 Age Fiction Prize
Winner of the 2006 Melbourne Best Writing Award

Part long-forgotten myth, part meditation on the violence and tragedy of contemporary Europe, Dead Europe is an unsettling story about blood lust and blood revenge; a novel of blazing brilliance from the acclaimed author of The Slap.

Isaac, a young Australian photographer, is travelling through Europe. His whole life he has longed for the sophistication and wealth of the Europe of his father's stories, the Europe at the centre of civilization and culture. But behind the facade of a unified and globalized contemporary society, he finds a history-blasted wasteland, a place forever condemned by the ghosts of its unspeakable past. In the mountain village in the Balkans where his mother was born, he unearths ancient terrors that have not been laid to rest, and perhaps never can be.

Dead Europe sets sharp realism against folk tale and fable, a world of hauntings and curses against a fiercely political portrait of a society. The energy in the writing, the pure fire in the narrative voice and the fearlessness of the tone make the novel immensely readable, as well as fascinating and original, and establish Christos Tsiolkas in the first rank of contemporary novelists. * Colm Toibin *
A novel of the most astonishing and disturbing eloquence ... shocking but beautiful. -- David Marr * Sydney Morning Herald *
Breathtakingly good... One of Tsiolkas'sstrengths is the ability to reveal gentleness lying where none might be expected. his prose is... achingly tender and beautiful. -- Ian Syson * The Age *
Brilliant ... unsettling ... It can shake you out of complacency, it can make you search your own soul to discover what's lurking there and what you really believe. And it can radically alter your view of the world... This blasphemous, disturbing, in-your-face book does all three. -- Sara Dowse * Canberra Times *

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of four novels: Loaded (filmed as Head-On) The Jesus Man, The Slap and Dead Europe. He is also a playwright, essayist and screen writer. He lives in Melbourne.