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A knock-out debut sports epic taking a unique journey into the world of Mixed Martial Arts fighting

Step into the octagon . . .

Welcome to the heart of the fight. Three years and two fighters - one ageing, tired, struggling from one backstreet dive to another; and one young, fast, going places, punching it out in packed Las Vegas arenas. One on the way up and the other on the way out. And they fight and they fight - while through it all Kit, a spacetaker, a ghost haunting their cages, follows and assists them, drawn to the dark allure of men living from blow to blow, where the true battle is never with their opponent but always and forever with themselves.

´The most fascinating book I´ve read this year. The precision of Howley´s prose reminds me of Joan Didion or David Foster Wallace´ Time

´A poetic portrait of a bloody American subculture´ O, The Oprah Magazine

´The fight book of our generation has landed . . . a fantastic debut´ The Week

´Compulsively readable´ The New York Times

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Publisher´s description. A genre-bending work of literary reportage. The profound and the absurd come face to face in this extraordinary auto-fiction exposé, as a bookish young woman stumbles across the bizarre underworld of professional cage fighting. Unexpectedly hooked on the spectacle, she befriends fighters and chases fights, becoming ever more entangled in the macabre, blackly comic and ultimately heart-breaking drama of the octagon. Penguin

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Howley, Kerry
Kerry Howley is the author of Thrown, published by Hamish Hamilton. Howley´s essays, reviews, stories and reportage have appeared in Harper´s, The New York Times Magazine, Slate,The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Vice.com, and frequently in Bookforum. Her short story ´Pretty Citadel´ was published in The Paris Review in Autumn 2011. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa, where she was admitted as an Arts Fellow and subsequently served as the 2012 Provost´s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. Howley teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

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