Punching Out
The final instalment in Fergus Smith's celebrated Colours Quartet, this powerful novel follows five soldiers as they leave the army and face the daunting challenge of civilian life in 2016 Britain. With unflinching honesty and profound insight, Smith explores what shapes our identity in a nation undergoing its own transformation on the world stage.
Available to order now.
The final instalment in Fergus Smith's celebrated Colours Quartet, this powerful novel follows five soldiers as they leave the army and face the daunting challenge of civilian life in 2016 Britain. With unflinching honesty and profound insight, Smith explores what shapes our identity in a nation undergoing its own transformation on the world stage.
Available to order now.
The final instalment in Fergus Smith's celebrated Colours Quartet, this powerful novel follows five soldiers as they leave the army and face the daunting challenge of civilian life in 2016 Britain. With unflinching honesty and profound insight, Smith explores what shapes our identity in a nation undergoing its own transformation on the world stage.
Available to order now.
It’s 2016, and five men leave the army to start afresh in ‘civvie street’. Despite everything they have done they face one of the greatest challenges of their lives and in a country that is simultaneously redefining its place in the world. The final novel in Fergus Smith’s Colours Quartet, this story explores a fundamental question: what makes us who we are?
“A book written from the inside; soldiers’ stories butting up against civilian realities; British lives as they are lived. I read Punching Out with admiration.”
Rachel Seiffert, author of The Dark Room (2001 and short-listed for the Booker Prize); Afterwards (2007 and long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction); The Walk Home (2014); and A Boy in Winter (2017).
“Punching Out offers the braided stories of five men, from a single regiment, as each navigates the transition from soldier to veteran to civilian. They come up against indifference, the complexity of civilian life, the unfamiliar ambiguities that surround how decisions get made, how a man is valued, about what matters. Each of these brothers in arms adjusts to a new life—or doesn’t. Smith’s gift here, as in his previous works of fiction, is his ability to present and embody, with delicate, ruthless, and heart-breaking precision, the hearts and minds and lives of unique individuals about whom we come to care deeply. Beyond this, Punching Out is also, without polemic, a portrait of the Britain they come “home” to: a country, and its politicians, stumbling through Brexit, navigating—like the soldiers—the uncertain debris of empire.”
Elizabeth T. Gray Jr is the author of Salient (2020), Series | India (2015), and After the Operation (2025).
“A gripping, eye-opening book, that gets to heart of what it means to have served your country in contemporary Britain”
Professor Helen Parr, author of Our Boys: The Story of a Paratrooper (2018)