
The Leap
by Paul Daley
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Pub Date Jul 29 2025 | Archive Date Jul 28 2025
Simon & Schuster (Australia) | S&S/Summit Books
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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.
Advance Praise
‘Propulsive, confronting, compelling. A masterpiece.’
– Chris Hammer, author of The Valley
'The Leap is a modern Wake in Fright. Confronting, tragic, brutal, compassionate and funny. A brilliant examination of the prejudice and violence that lies at the heart of this country. A novel that speaks truth about crimes past and present.'
– Michael Brissenden, author of Smoke
‘This novel is an explosion of truth-telling about Australia’s bloody past, taking us on a tumultuous outback crime adventure, sometimes hilarious and often outrageous.’
– Julie Janson, author of Benevolence
‘Paul Daley's vivid rendering of an outback town ruled by fear, alcohol and barely suppressed violence, damned by a malevolent and unspoken past, is unforgettable. It will disturb your nights.’
– Tony Wright, journalist
‘Paul Daley shatters the great Australian silence with a penetrating story that reveals the truth and trauma of Country. From his elegant and excavating pen comes another important and revelatory work.’
– Nick Bryant, journalist and author of The Forever War
A Wake in Fright for the 21st century. Savage, hilarious and ultimately profound, The Leap hurtles into Australia’s heart of darkness with exhilarating results.’
– James Bradley, author of Landfall
‘Unflinching, razor-edged and raw. Another tour de force by Paul Daley.’
– Joanna Jenkins, author of The Bluff
‘Paul Daley continues his ongoing examination of the frontier's lasting effects, repainting Wake in Fright's Bundanyabba hellmouth with a twenty-first century understanding of dispossession and racial division. Here are the drinking culture, the unconcealed bloodlust and the deluded squattocracy, all seen through the baffled eyes of a post-empire Briton. Only a writer of Daley's quality could bring empathy and nuance to the canon of Australian bush noir.’
– Jock Serong, author of Cherrywood
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781761632525 |
PRICE | A$34.99 (AUD) |
PAGES | 336 |