- Published: 15 April 2020
- ISBN: 9781760144784
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 256
The Adversary
- Published: 15 April 2020
- ISBN: 9781760144784
- Imprint: Penguin eBooks
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 256
It's a rare book that gives life to our lives as they're actually lived. The Adversary is stunning in its honesty, astounding in its intimacy. Warm, sexy, bittersweet, and capacious, Scott's novel is an instant classic – the boy-meets-boy-meets-boys debut I've been waiting to read for a long, long while. We're simply lucky to have it.
Bryan Washington
Terrific, sad and elegant and funny and also bloody moving. Quietly, unexpectedly moving.
Christos Tsiolkas
Ronnie Scott’s The Adversary offers that most rare and wonderful thing: a fresh, original voice. By turns claustrophobic and euphoric, intimate and defamiliarising, this slow-burn novel is smart, strange and utterly compelling. The kind of book that will have you missing the characters and wondering what they’re doing long after you greedily consume its final pages.
Emily Bitto
The Adversary is moving, moody, surprising, funny and wonderfully clear-eyed storytelling. Scott is a sharply observant master of the sexual and social lives of a group of friends, all in the process of becoming who they hope to be. This book doesn’t just engage the reader, it captures us.
Amy Bloom
Ronnie Scott captures the ironic cadence, casual obsessions and gay neuroses of a generation and delivers something wryly funny, very endearing and – in the best possible way – too real.
Benjamin Law
A subtle, savage and elegant work of fiction.
Peter Polites
Sharp, clever and fizzing with the kind of anxiety that provides a brittle edge to the gorgeousness of youth, The Adversary is a hilarious ride through queer Melbourne. If Evelyn Waugh had lived in Melbourne and had access to Grindr maybe he would have written The Adversary. Luckily we have Ronnie Scott.
Krissy Kneen
Queensland Literary Awards
Shortlisted • 2020 • The University of Queensland Fiction Book Award
ALS Gold Medal Award
Shortlisted • 2021 • ALS Gold Medal Award