27 June 2016
Towards the end of the noughties, Colm Tóibín bounced into the office of a London publisher clutching a fat Australian novel and insisting that he had to bring it to the UK. His enthusiasm for what he would later acclaim as a book "of immense power and scope, reminiscent of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Don DeLillo's Underworld" caused some surprise at Atlantic Books, which was among the 80-odd publishers that had already rejected Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap.
