Cockroach - Softcover

Hage, Rawi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141040815 ISBN 13: 9780141040813

Publisher: Penguin, 2010

Synopsis

Our unnamed narrator has left his Middle-Eastern home and settled in a chilly, western city. He lives as an exile, untrusted, unwanted, foreign. A stranger trying to make sense of a strange land.

But he brings with him secrets - of a family tragedy that he failed to prevent and a childhood overshadowed by war. And as he wanders snowy streets, falling in love with fellow exile Shoreh, he realizes that to find a place in this alien world it is necessary to become someone else. Someone he never dared to be in his past life . . .

About this title

Review:

Gripping. A humane and compassionate storyteller (New Statesman)

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 Toíbín)

Compelling, intriguing, deceptive (Financial Times)

Further evidence of Hage's large and unsettling talent (Guardian)

From the Back Cover:

Praise for Cockroach:

“[A] dark and uncompromising vision. [Cockroach] offers a version of an émigré 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 this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0141040815
• ISBN 13: 9780141040813
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320