ABOUT
THE BOOK

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 naïve 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 night-time 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.

Like De Niro’s Game, winner of the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 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 humour.

In 2008, Cockroach was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.

It won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, presented by the Quebec Writers’ Federation.