Challenge

Fast-paced Australian political fiction, Challenge unfolds over three days in an atmosphere of treachery and deceit, amid a looming federal leadership challenge.

Opposition leader Daniel Slattery is a former sporting hero from the wrong side of the tracks, politically principled and courageous, but also personally unhinged and highly volatile. He is determined to stand the political moral high ground while fighting for his job—and a rearguard action against the phantoms of his dark past. Who is working to trash his reputation and derail his one tilt at the prime ministership? Is it real—or just demons inside his head?

Blistering and blackly comic, Challenge puts us into the shoes of a man whose life is slipping away as he confronts the abyss of modern Australian politics.

About the Author

Paul Daley is a Canberra author, columnist and multi-award-winning journalist. He has worked extensively overseas-including in conflict zones-and has covered national affairs for major Australian publications including The Age, The Sunday Age and The Bulletin. He is the author of the best-selling Beersheba and, most recently, Armageddon: Two men on an Anzac trail. He is married to political journalist Lenore Taylor and they have three children. He is now writing a novel.

For Collingwood: A Love Story, Paul travelled in Doc and Paddy's footsteps on the Western Front, tracing the terrible battles in which each man fought, and stood by Paddy's gravestone on the Somme to ponder who he really was and whether his wife and his best mate really knew him at all. Against this backdrop he reveals the role that the Collingwood Football Club played in the struggling community that gave rise to it.