Last Bell

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 sisters death and his parents illness, he turned back to boxing just as Tyson Furys improbable resurrection proved the ring could still offer redemption.

McRae takes us close to champions including Fury, Canelo lvarez, Katie Taylor and Oleksandr Usyk. He doesnt shy away from exploring huge themes doping, state repression, war and he doesnt 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 McRaes most personal and unflinching book, a clear-eyed reckoning with life and the sport he cant let go.

Exhilarating and terrifying Herald