The Call is a historical novel by Australian writer Martin Flanagan.

[2] The novel follows the life of Tom Wills, considered a founder of Australian rules football.

Writing in The Age Jack Hibberd commented: "While The Call deploys fictional devices, such as extensively scarred old red gums symbolically embodying the mutilated blacks, and a helmeted Nek Kelly surreally "emerging from the soft white skin of a young woman's shoulder," it does not quite have the deep knit of a novel.

Nor does it quite knit as biography and history...This formal irresolution does not, howver [sic?

], detract from the pleasures in this book: the vivid evocations of our colonial and Aboriginal past, of city and country, of sporting wizardry, and of the strangely soulful narrator's search for heroes in an empty culture.