Cockroach - Hardcover

Hage, Rawi

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241144442 ISBN 13: 9780241144442

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, 2009

Synopsis

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 naive 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 emigre 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...

About this title

From the Back Cover

Praise for Cockroach: "[A] dark and uncompromising vision. [Cockroach] offers a version of an emigre underground which is original, raw and brave."-Colm Toibin"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"Searing, affecting, misanthropic."-Mohsin Hamid"Most fiction writers are primarily either stylists or plotters, but Hage is clearly both. There's a slight jolting sensation as the narrative shifts gear from poetic to cinematic, with guns and knives and elaborately contrived set-ups replacing the earlier evocations of drains and flesh and wintry streets, but it's all managed with great brio and expertise."-James Lasdun, The Guardian

About the Author

Rawi Hage was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and lived through nine years of the Lebanese civil war during the 1970s. 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0241144442
• ISBN 13: 9780241144442
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 305