The Adversary

By: Michael Crummey

Narrated by: Mary Lewis

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF 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 a 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” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“One of our best writers” — Booklist (starred review)

In the isolated outport of Mockbeggar on Newfoundland's northern coast, company man Abe Strapp is about to marry the daughter of a rival merchant and so secure his dominance over the shore, until the Widow Caines, arrives to throw the wedding and Abe's plans into chaos.

As the bitter feud between the man and woman who own Mockbeggar's largest mercantile firms—each determined to ruin the person they despise most—spirals further into vendetta and violence, the locals too are forced to take sides, with devastating consequences.

A compulsive, exuberant and uncompromising historical adventure—for fans of HBO’s Deadwood and Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wild—The Adversary is a wildly entertaining evocation of power, grievance and retribution, and Michael Crummey's finest novel to date.

Sorry, No Can Do No More

I love that this is a Newfie author, I love that he is writing about Newfoundlanders, I love the Newfie narrator.
Unfortunately, I'm feeling zero love for the story. I have given it my best. I'm only a little over an hour from the end, but cannot bring myself to listen any longer. To put it simply, I find the story boring. It just kind of ambles on with no particular goal in sight.
To Kill A Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn also amble on, but are captivatingly interesting in the process.
As I listened on, I kept coming back to the glowing praise heaped on The Adversary by the Globe and Mail and the New York Times, wondering if we were looking at the same book.