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Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year 2025

‘Thoroughly encapsulates the current state of the hurt business’ Telegraph, Best Books of 2025

For fifty years Donald McRae has followed boxing. As criminality and corruption spread, his love for the sport dimmed. In 2018, grieving his sister’s death and his parents’ illness, he turned back to boxing – just as Tyson Fury’s improbable resurrection proved the ring could still offer redemption.

McRae takes us close to champions including Fury, Canelo Alvarez, Katie Taylor and Oleksandr Usyk. He doesn’t shy away from exploring huge themes – doping, state repression, war – and he doesn’t flinch from recording the thudding hits or the heartbreak a fighter feels in defeat. And in telling the devastating story of Patrick Day, he confronts death in the ring.

The Last Bell is McRae’s most personal and unflinching book, a clear-eyed reckoning with life and the sport he can’t let go.

‘Exhilarating and terrifying’ Herald

Publisher Review

‘Boxing’s grim appeal is revisited by one of its finest chroniclers, alongside a more personal story of loss and grief. Drawn back into the fight game by Tyson Fury’s redemption story, McRae takes us ringside to some thrilling bouts. It’s full of tender insight, and thoroughly encapsulates the current state of the hurt business’ * Telegraph, Best Books of 2025 * ‘You finish this powerful and poignant book with renewed admiration for the courage of many of the boxers, while being contemptuous of the extravagant circus that surrounds them’ — Jason Cowley * Sunday Times, Book of the Week * ‘Characteristically riveting . . . results in an unusual and fascinating level of access’ — Mike Jackman * Spectator * ‘As with the sport itself, boxing writing is about so much more than physical combat – it’s about the dark drama of life and death in their totality. That Donald McRae understands this implicitly makes him one of the very best writers working today. I’ll read anything he turns his hand to’ — Benjamin Myers, author of The Offing and The Gallows Pole ‘Don McRae has spent fifty years in thrall to the fight game. The Last Bell is at once a moving memoir and McRae’s swansong as a boxing writer – a fine, vivid, and searching tribute to a sport that can be as lethal as it is uplifting’ — Ed Caesar, author of The Moth and the Mountain ‘The Last Bell is heart-pounding and enraging, and yet somehow tender, too, full of the grace and wisdom that comes from decades of observing and reflecting on boxing (and sport, competition, spectacle, in general). Reading about Patrick Day’s devastating final bout, I was pacing my office. Thrilling and raw, this is sport writing at its best, but also much more than that. McRae crafts an urgent and unforgettable meditation on risk, loss, and our enduring hunger to find meaning in struggle: a subject that captivates and brings together readers and writers of all kinds’ — Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee ‘Nobody writes about boxing like Don McRae. But with The Last Bell he has written a book that moves beyond just boxing and grapples instead with what it truly means to fight. It is a book about knowing when to bite down and keep swinging, about knowing when to throw in the towel, a book about loss and defeat, and how we might, in the final reckoning, face those inevitabilities with a kind of a redeeming grace’ — Keiran Goddard, author of I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning ‘It should be treated with the reverence it deserves and preserved in a time capsule somewhere. For The Last Bell, like Dark Trade before it, strikes this writer as a radical act, the kind of work that not only captures the current boxing climate with precision, but also promotes a language and brand of honesty one feared had been eradicated from the sport in recent years… beautifully written… McRae, 29 years after Dark Trade, continues to write about boxing with an elegance, intelligence and maturity and again delivers the definitive text on where we are today. The Last Bell is a book plenty of people need to read but only one person could have written’ — Elliot Worsell, Boxing Scene, author of Dog Rounds: Death and Life in the Boxing Ring ‘A beautiful, gripping, always surprising book about sport, life, boxing, men, women, art, ageing, family and why we get lost in things. Don McRae is a champion of sports writing. This book is a relentlessly absorbing mix of detail, humour, sadness, wisdom and colour from a life lived in that world’ — Barney Ronay, chief sports writer at the Guardian ‘Boxing might not deserve [McRae’s] talent. But it sure as hell needs it.’ * Fight Post *