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 naďve 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 . . .
Praise for Cockroach
‘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
‘Hage owes something to Kafka and even more to Camus but
what he makes of them belongs distinctly to himself’
Globe and Mail
