The Leap

(Paperback)

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A white-knuckle ride into a nightmarish outback setting, where a man searching for mercy encounters a town baying for violent vengeance. A pulse-pounding literary thriller with a stunning final twist.

`Think three-fifths of the way to fuck-all-nowhere-ville. Pioneering grazing family. Once hallowed farming country gone to shit. Rabbit plagues and feral pigs. Never-ending drought. Full of Flat Earth Party-voting, climate-change-denying, God-bothering, gun-nut, ground-zero, wife-beating, racist, fundamentalist f*ckers. Pardon my French. Apart from that its just a great place.

Welcome to The Leap, an outback town fuelled by fear, churning with corruption, prejudice and misogyny and blighted by its inescapable history of frontier violence. Into this nightmarish morass falters traumatised British diplomat, Benedict Fotheringham-Gaskill. Hes on his first Australian mission, one seemingly straightforward enough until he arrives in The Leap to battle a town conspiring against him.

The Leap is baying for violent vengeance over the alleged murder of the celebrated daughter of a powerful local grazier. But Benedict is on an impossible quest for the opposite: mercy for the young womans two alleged female killers. The townspeople will challenge and threaten Benedict at every turn as he fights for justice, his future, his sanity and ultimately his life.

From the acclaimed author of Jesustown comes a pulse-pounding throat-punch of a literary thriller, filled with humour, horror, blistering historical truths, indelible characters and a final twist that will take your breath away.

Author Bio

Paul Daley is an author, journalist, essayist and short story writer. His books have been shortlisted for the Prime Ministers History Prize and ACT Book of the Year. He has won two Walkley Awards and the National Press Club Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism. His essays have appeared in Meanjin and Griffith Review, and he writes Postcolonial, a column for The Guardian about Australian national identity, history and Indigenous culture. His literary novel Jesustown was published to great acclaim in 2022. Author website pauldaleywrites.com and Instagram @pauldaleywrites