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The Leap
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Check link for latest rating. ( 112 ratings, 26 reviews)
Brief Description
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...
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The Leap
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Description
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 it’s 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. He’s 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 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 woman’s two accused female killers. The townspeople will challenge and threaten him 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.
Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9781761632525
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 29 July 2025
Country: Australia
Imprint: Summit Books Australia
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Width: 153.0mm
Height: 234.0mm
Weight: 250g
Pages: 336
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About the Author
Paul Daley is an author, journalist, essayist and short story writer. His books have been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s 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
Also by Paul Daley
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Jesustown
'This is a story—a great story—with all the tragedy and lies that is colonial Australia. Our circle of tragedy.' Thomas Mayor, author of Finding the Heart of the Nation 'Poignant and powerful; the best book I've read this year.' Chris Hammer, author of Scrublands 'A challenging statement about the mythology of Australian colonial history. It confronts the hard questions with...Paperback$3799Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Canberra
A strong sense of 'otherness' defines Canberra to a point where there is a smugness, bordering on arrogance, that the rest of Australia can hate but they'll never know just how good it is to live here. Canberra is a city of orphans. People come for the jobs but stay on as they discover unanticipated promise and opportunity. They become...Paperback$3499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
On Patriotism
How has militarisation come to define Australian valour? Why has the long shadow of World War I dominated our sense of patriotism? On Patriotism explores what it really means to love and serve your country. Paul Daley contemplates ways to escape the cultural binds that tie us to Anzac, British settlement, and flag-waving. 'Straight from the heart and deeply informed....Paperback$1999Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
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A hundred years ago in October 1917, members of the 4th Australian Light Horse Brigade participated in what is now regarded as the last great successful cavalry charge. Waving bayonets overhead in the dying light, they raced across six kilometres of exposed ground in Palestine, surprising the well-entrenched Turks. It was the decisive blow in the British capture of the...PaperbackSold Out
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