Rawi Hage

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 tells her - and us - his heartrending and hallucinatory story.

Hage RawiDuring 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. Leading us back into his childhood in a war-toon country and forward into his current life in the smoky emigre cafes of his new city, 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.

Una història incendiària i plena de bellesa sobre la Guerra Civil del Líban. Escrita amb ràbia, energia i explosivitat. Imprescindible. Deu mil bombes cauen sobre Beirut. En Bassam i en George observ

Rawi Hage narra la vida de un inmigrante iraní, que llega a Canadá asediado por el sentimiento de culpa que le provoca la muerte reciente de su hermana, asesinada por su marido, y el amor que de pronto le despierta Shoreh, una hermosa mujer que, detras de su belleza, esconde un pasado oscuro. Asi a traves de este personaje, Hage se interna, con un sentido del humor acido que descorre el velo de la desesperacion, en la vida de los inmigrantes en las calles ordenadas de Montreal, la vida de un grupo de personas desterradas que, lejos de todo, pero cerca de si mismas, encuentran su lugar en el mundo.

«La prosa de Hage es a la vez nítidamente realista y emocionantemente llena de oscuras fantasías, como si Kahlil Gibran fumara costo con Hunter S. » Thompson. Washington City Paper «Una visión alucin

In Carnival, IMPAC award-winning Rawi Hage explores the hidden underbelly of a city. There are two types of taxi driver in the Carnival city - the spiders and the flies. The spiders sit and stew in their cars, waiting for the calls to come to them. But the flies wander the streets, looking for the raised flags of hands. Fly is a wanderer. From the seat of his taxi we see the world in all of its carnivalesque beauty and ugliness. We meet criminals, prostitutes, madmen, revolutionaries, ordinary people going to extraordinary places. With all of the beauty, truth, rage, and peripatetic storytelling that have made his first two novels international sensations, Carnival is a tour de force that will make all of life's passengers squirm in their backseats. "A spellbinding success, a master storyteller. A tremendous novel". (Daily Telegraph). "A rich and often beautiful, brave, engrossing, intelligent, literate, funny and very human novel. I enjoyed this book in so many ways. I relished this novel - for its compassion, its lyricism and its great human spirit". (Guardian). "Dark and compelling, a restlessly energetic and kaleidoscopic work". (Financial Times). 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, 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.