Cockroach: A Novel

Fiction & Literature, Literary
Cover of the book Cockroach: A Novel by Rawi Hage, W. W. Norton & Company
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Author: Rawi Hage ISBN: 9780393076837
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company Publication: October 12, 2009
Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company Language: English
Author: Rawi Hage
ISBN: 9780393076837
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publication: October 12, 2009
Imprint: W. W. Norton & Company
Language: English

A bold, razor-sharp novel about a shadowy antihero navigating Montreal’s immigrant underworld.

One of the most highly anticipated novels of the year, Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage’s critically acclaimed first book, De Niro’s Game. The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal’s restless immigrant community, where a self-described “thief” has just tried but failed to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in a local park. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naive therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator’s violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky émigré cafés where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen nighttime streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him.

Cockroach combines an uncompromising vision of humanity with razor-sharp portraits of society's outsiders, and a startling, poetic sensibility with bracing jolts of dark humor.

View on Amazon View on AbeBooks View on Kobo View on B.Depository View on eBay View on Walmart

A bold, razor-sharp novel about a shadowy antihero navigating Montreal’s immigrant underworld.

One of the most highly anticipated novels of the year, Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage’s critically acclaimed first book, De Niro’s Game. The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal’s restless immigrant community, where a self-described “thief” has just tried but failed to commit suicide by hanging himself from a tree in a local park. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naive therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator’s violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky émigré cafés where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen nighttime streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him.

Cockroach combines an uncompromising vision of humanity with razor-sharp portraits of society's outsiders, and a startling, poetic sensibility with bracing jolts of dark humor.

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