Cockroach

by RawiHage (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2010

  $5.21

  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 . . .

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.50

  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, 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 emigre 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 . . .

• Used

  Hardcover
  2009

  $38.45

  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 . . .

• New

  Paperback
  2010

  $17.38

  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 . . .