#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

Shortlisted for the 2023 BMO Winterset Award • Longlisted for the 2024 Killick Capital Fiction Award, part of the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards

Named Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker • The Globe and Mail • CBC • Toronto Star • Kirkus Reviews

From the award-winning, bestselling author of The Innocents, a dark, enthralling novel about love and its limitations, the corruption of power and the power of corruption.

“A FLAWLESSLY CRAFTED NARRATIVE” —Wall Street Journal
“CEASELESSLY ENTERTAINING” —Kirkus (Starred Review)
“A MASTERPIECE” —Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
”ONE OF OUR BEST WRITERS” —Booklist (Starred Review)

In an isolated outport on Newfoundland's northern coastline, Abe Strapp is about to marry the daughter of a rival merchant to cement his hold on the shore when the Widow Caines arrives to throw the wedding and Abe's plans into chaos.
That ruthless act of sabotage is the opening salvo in a battle between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar's largest mercantile firms, each fighting for the scarce resources of the north Atlantic fishery, each seeking a measure of revenge on the person they despise most in the world. As their unshakeable animosity spirals further each year into vendettas and violence, the community is increasingly divided and even the innocents in Mockbeggar find themselves forced to take sides, with devastating consequences.
Through merciless seasons of uncertainty and want, through predatory storms and pandemics and marauding privateers, it is the human heart that reveals itself to be the most formidable and unpredictable adversary for each person drawn, inevitably and helplessly, into that endless feud.
Compulsively interesting and uncompromising, The Adversary is a pitch-perfect evocation of a lost time, and a shadowed mirror to our modern politics of grievance and retribution. It is Michael Crummey's finest novel to date.