The Adversary
Michael Crummey, Doubleday, £9.99

MICHAEL CRUMMEY’s The Adversary, winner of the 2025 Dublin Literary Award, is an atmospheric novel that probes the complexities of early colonial Newfoundland through themes of power, and class. Set in a remote coastal community, the narrative interrogates the moral and human costs of empire, patriarchy, and capitalist extraction.

Early 19th-century Newfoundland is portrayed as a frontier colony defined by British imperial rule, the Church of England, and struggling settler communities. References to the king’s army and Hanoverian military root the story in an era of imperial expansion.

At the story’s core are the Strapps: Abe, a brutish merchant, and his cunning sister, the Widow Caines. Their rivalry, echoing Cain and Abel, embodies the colonial elite’s exploitation of land and labour. Crummey critiques how their economic dominance perpetuates cycles of poverty, with the harsh Newfoundland landscape (storms, plagues, and icy isolation) mirroring the cruelty of the social order.

Among the novel’s most compelling elements is its attention to female perspective, particularly through the widow Caines. A figure of resilience and manipulation, she supports the poor selectively but ultimately serves her own capitalist ambitions. Though nominally a Quaker, she corrupts that community’s egalitarian values for personal gain. Her betrayal of Solemn, motivated by a private vendetta, reveals how class overrides gender. Other women — healer Mary Oram, teacher Relief Picco, and servant Bride Lambe — see through her ambitions and embody moral clarity.

Crummey subtly weaves in colonial attitudes toward Indigenous peoples. Though understated in this instance, this reclamation of dignity aligns with Crummey’s broader project of challenging historical erasure.

Crummey’s use of 19th-century English and regional Newfoundland expressions immerses readers in the time and place. The rot at the heart of colonial power is embodied in the ruling class’s excesses and depravity. Abe Strapp’s Big House becomes a symbol of moral collapse, where drunkenness, gambling, and sexual exploitation flourish. A scene of Inez Barter’s humiliation exemplifies the sadism underpinning colonial power, with bystander complicity highlighting systemic cruelty. The ”mumble a sparrow” contest, a barbaric bird-biting spectacle, distils violence into entertainment, laying bare the dehumanisation at empire’s core.

Yet resistance stirs beneath the surface. It is dangerous and often crushed — most brutally in a public whipping meant to instil terror. But this spectacle backfires, sparking community outrage and a moment of collective defiance. Even in this brutal world, a shared desire for justice and dignity emerges. Crummey suggests that resistance, however fleeting, is never extinguished.

The novel’s title, The Adversary, is deliberately ambiguous. It suggests not just an individual antagonist, but the broader forces of betrayal, exploitation, and domination. Crummey centres the story on the widow, Abe Strapp, and those caught in their orbit, offering a nuanced, often female-focused exploration of complicity, survival, and resistance.

Crummey acknowledges the novel’s darkness, admitting the world he portrays is “probably a lot darker than the reality of the time.” But he justifies this by pointing to contemporary parallels: “What I decided I was going to do was take the worst of the world as we have made it and compress it all down and have it play out in this tiny community in Newfoundland 200 years ago.” His horror at rising authoritarianism — particularly in the US — informs the novel’s urgency.

The Adversary thus transcends historical fiction. It becomes a modern parable, challenging readers to confront the legacies of empire, the seductions of power, and the possibilities of resistance. It warns that the adversaries of justice — greed, violence, and apathy — are not confined to the past, and that reckoning with history is also a reckoning with the present.