The Champion's New Clothes — Barry Graham

It's an opportunity a journalist and ex-boxer with a complicated personal life can't turn down - joining the camp of the world title challenger, Ricky Mallon, in the run-up to the championship fight. For Billy Piers it's more than work, it's an escape from Karen, loving and beautiful but disturbed, and unaware of what he's going through - that he's in love with someone else, someone who can't decide who she's in love with at all. Set in the urban wastelands of Scotland in the 1980s, The Champion's New Clothes is about love and friendship, loneliness and violence, from the brutality of the boxing ring to the cruelty that goes hand in hand with romance. As Ricky trains for the hardest fight of his life, Billy faces the hardest decision of his. Both men are driven by desire, and both men come to realize that nothing is ever what it seems, and that it is desire that creates the cruelest illusions of all. With wit and acute honesty, The Champion's New Clothes warns: Beware of what you want. You might get it.