The Adversary

WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD AND ONE OF KIRKUS’S BEST BOOKS OF 2024

“Potent…[a] vibrant historical novel….By turns bawdy, violent, comic, and gruesome.”
—The New Yorker

“Ingeniously constructed and wound tight as a mainspring…Flawlessly crafted…A sinuous narrative in constant, elegant motion.”
—The Wall Street Journal

“The Adversary is a beautifully written, immensely powerful and subtly ingenious novel. Its greatest — which is to say, most monstrous — revelations are so discreetly offered that you could miss them; but when you realize them, they practically take your breath away.”
—The Washington Post

“Crummey weaves forgotten idioms into dialogue and action, creating a knotty, muscular, incantatory language that builds on Melville and Proulx as much as biblical antecedents….The story may be dark but each sentence sparkles….Exquisite prose. Spellbinding drama.… “The Adversary” is a magnificent novel that reinvents and subverts the Genesis account until its final page.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Spellbinding…Along with a vivid setting and memorable characters, Crummey impresses with his dexterous use of language to convey the time period…This gripping page-turner is Crummey’s masterpiece”
—Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)

“[Crummey’s] language is ceaselessly entertaining…The sheer energy of the novel never flags. It’s the latest superb effort by an author who couldn’t be more deserving of greater recognition beyond his native Canada. An enthralling masterpiece.”
—Kirkus (Starred Review)

“Crummey masterfully builds the suspense while tempering the intensity with instances of selfless devotion. Crummey has quietly established himself as one of our best writers.”
—Booklist (Starred Review)

“Crummey writes with a poet’s sense of language, bringing a delicacy and grace to every sentence, even as the beauty of the prose is juxtaposed against the ugliness of its subject matter. . . . Masterpiece is a glib word and one that is thrown-around all too casually, but here it seems to fit: The Adversary is a masterpiece, plain and simple. The fact that it joins previous Crummey novels . . . under that designation, is all the more impressive.”
—The Toronto Star

“Gobsmackingly accomplished… Crummey’s novel simply fascinates. It’s a peerless study of interpersonal strife and power dynamics.”
—Quill and Quire