Cockroach

Hage, Rawi

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0241144485 ISBN 13: 9780241144480

Casa editrice: Hamish Hamilton, 2009

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, an immigrant from a sunny Arab country, tells her - and us - his heartrending and sometimes hallucinatory story.

Leading us back to his childhood in a war-torn country and forward into his current life in the smoky émigré cafes of his new city, where everyone has a story to tell, Cockroach traces, with lyricism and dark humour, 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 . . .

L'autore:

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.