Cockroach
A Novel
4 October 2011
Territory Rights — Worldwide, excluding Canada, the British Commonwealth and the European Union.
Description
"Funny and sharp . . . playful and erotic."—New York Times Book Review
In Montreal's restless immigrant community, our unnamed narrator is living in despair. Forced to visit a therapist after a suicide attempt, he brings us back to his 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 he imagines himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but willfully blind, citizens who surround him. Cockroach is a carnivalesque, philosophical novel that weaves dark humor with an accusatory, satirical voice, spawning from the subsurface to challenge humanity and its downfall.
Reviews
"There is something exhilarating about [Cockroach's] relentlessness. . . . The narrator is ambiguous, untrustworthy, sly, and filled with a despair both nasty and noisy; but he is also deeply wounded, oddly lovable, his voice both moving and manipulative." — Colm Tóibín, New York Review of Books
Awards
Shortlisted — Governor General's Literary Award, 2008
Shortlisted — Scotiabank Giller Prize, 2008