The Lobster Trap
The Global Fight for a Seafood on the Brink
$55.10
- Hardcover
320 pages
- Release Date
16 September 2025
Summary
A page-turning examination of how a multi-billion dollar industry creates enormous wealth and endless heartache, at a time when climate change, swings in the market, and greed are impacting fishermen’s livelihoods in new and dramatic ways.
Lobster has been a phenomenal success story, with a commercial fishery that has generated enormous wealth and fuelled appetites for one of the world’s most recognizable luxury foods. The great lobster boom that began in the 1990s has also led to vio…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780771006326 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 0771006322 |
| Author: | Greg Mercer |
| Publisher: | McClelland & Stewart Inc. |
| Imprint: | McClelland & Stewart Inc. |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 320 |
| Release Date: | 16 September 2025 |
| Weight: | 540g |
| Dimensions: | 237mm x 160mm |
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What They're Saying
Critics Review
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2026 RAKUTEN KOBO EMERGING WRITER PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION
A 2026 JAMES BEARD BOOK AWARD NOMINEE
A GLOBE AND MAIL 100 BEST BOOK OF 2025
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
“Deeply researched…. [Mercer] grounds this global saga in moving human stories, like that of a lifelong Canadian lobsterman who worries his children won’t be able to carry on the family legacy. This is a revelatory account of an industry on the verge of collapse.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Mercer draws on his Maritime roots and decades of reporting experience to paint a vivid portrait of a historic, lucrative industry facing the brunt of intersecting crises.” —Karen Pinchin, The Globe and Mail
“The Lobster Trap is a beautiful, briny reckoning—a clear-eyed portrait of coastal communities caught between old rhythms and a new, less forgiving ocean. Greg Mercer brings the same instinct for character and place that defines his journalism, but here it deepens into something richer: a kind of elegy that still holds space for grit, grace, and dark humour. This is a book about a fishery—but also about memory, climate, and capitalism; about what gets passed down, and what’s being lost. Mercer doesn’t steer the story so much as trail it like a line through water, letting the rhythms of coastal life and the people living it shape its arc. In doing so, he gives us something rare: a story that’s urgent, unshowy, and quietly unforgettable.”
—Chris Wilson-Smith, Report on Business, The Globe and Mail
About The Author
Greg Mercer
GREG MERCER is an investigative reporter for The Globe and Mail, where he writes in-depth stories about issues of international interest, from the drone-spying scandal at the Paris Olympics to the deadly legacy of the coal mining industry. He was previously the Globe’s Atlantic Canada reporter, where he covered the worst mass shooting in Canadian history, and wrote about violent protests over a growing First Nations-run commercial lobster fishery. He has also reported for the BBC, The Guardian, and The Toronto Star. His reporting has earned him multiple National Newspaper Awards and the Michener-Deacon Fellowship for Investigative Reporting. This is his first book.
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