Cockroach by Rawi Hage

Cockroach by Rawi Hage

During a bitterly cold winter in a snowy northern city, a self-confessed thief has just tried to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in the local park. Rescued against his will and obliged to attend sessions with a well-meaning but naïve therapist, our narrator tells her - and us - his heartrending and hallucinatory story. From his childhood in a war-torn Arab country, to his current life in the smoky émigré cafes of his new city, Cockroach traces our narrator's journey - his longing for a place in the world, his guilt over his sister's death at the hands of her husband, and his love for an Iranian woman, Shoreh, whose life is also a flight from the darkness of the past. As the stories in this remarkable book converge, our narrator must confront the events of the past in the form of another moral but potentially murderous dilemma in the present . . .

Beautifully paced, filled with picaresque wit and misadventure, anchored by a dark and uncompromising vision. . Rawi Hage has joined the great pantheon of Canadian writers whose work we read with admiration and excitement * Colm Tóibín *
One of the best contemporary novels I've read in a long time. A dark Dostoevskian fable, which lowers the reader into the sewers of immigrant Montreal to confront an underground world teeming with sex, crime and greedy insectoid life * Hari Kunzru *
Invigorating, managed with great brio and expertise. Further evidence of Hage's large and unsettling talent * Guardian *

Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s and 1980s. He emigrated to Canada in 1992 and now lives in Montreal. His first novel, De Niro's Game, won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world in a given year, and has either won or been shortlisted for seven other major awards and prizes. Cockroach was the winner of the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Awards. It was also shortlisted for the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780241144442
ISBN 10	0241144442
Title	Cockroach
Author	Rawi Hage
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd
Year published	2009-06-04
Number of pages	320
Prizes	Winner of Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction 2008 (UK)
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable