The Last Bell

Life, Death and Boxing

Donald McRae

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781398504196

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

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Chapter 1: Resurrection
• Chapter 2: Loss, Again
• Chapter 3: Night and Day
• Chapter 4: The Boy from Brixton
• Chapter 5: Long Island Blues and Las Vegas Highs
• Chapter 6: Death in Lockdown
• Chapter 7: In the Bubble
• Chapter 8: Heavy Business
• Chapter 9: The Kings of Vegas and Crystal Palace
• Chapter 10: Going to War
• Chapter 11: The Lonely Passion of Katie Taylor
• Chapter 12: The Stretcher
• Chapter 13: The Taste of Strawberries
• Chapter 14: The Change
• Chapter 15: The War Ground
• Chapter 16: Butterflies and Promoters
• Chapter 17: Back Home
• Chapter 18: Champions and Dissidents
• Chapter 19: The Test
• Chapter 20: Resolution
• Epilogue: The Last Dance
• Photographs
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright