‘The Slap’ by Christos Tsiolkas to be NBC miniseries

Lisa Cholodenko has signed on to direct the first two episodes of “The Slap,” an upcoming miniseries for NBC based on the novel by Christos Tsiolkas.

The suburban drama, which was published in 2010 in the U.S. and 2008 in Tsiolkas’ native Australia, was awarded the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It has also been adapted as a television miniseries in Australia.

The book focuses on three female friends and their families in Melbourne whose lives change when an adult slaps a child at a barbecue.

“There are domestic themes, familiar trappings and issues here, but [Tsiolkas] tips us off that his book won’t be a rote story about the suburbs, upwardly mobile professionals and those just trying to make it in the middle class, nor will it be a didactic tale about multicultural society and the tensions between progressive and conservative thinking,” our reviewer Oscar Villalon wrote in 2010.

Villalon compared the book to “The Sopranos” meets “The Real Housewives of Orange County.”

Cholodenko, who directed “The Kids Are Alright,” is not new to literary adaptations. She also directed the upcoming HBO miniseries “Olive Kitteridge,” based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Elizabeth Strout.

A broadcast date for NBC’s “The Slap” has not yet been announced.