A receiver and method are described herein that address inter-symbol interference in a received signal by using a two-stage equalizer which includes a first demodulation stage that processes the received signal and produces initial symbol decisions, and a non-linear equalization second stage that uses the received signal to perform a sequential search in an attempt to improve upon the initial symbol decisions where if able to improve upon the initial symbol decisions then an output sequence is obtained from the sequential search and if not able to improve upon the sequence metric threshold then the output sequence is the initial symbol decisions.