The Last Bell

Life, Death and Boxing
A revealing look at the ruin and salvation of twenty-first century boxing, from one of sport’s greatest contemporary writers.

Winner of the Pinsent Masons Sports Writing Award at the Charles Tyrwhitt Sports Book Awards 2026

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 Álvarez, 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 

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