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 na�ve 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 �migr� cafes of his new city, where ...
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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 na�ve 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 �migr� 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 . . .
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Add this copy of Cockroach to cart. $47.81, good condition, Sold by Bestsellers Returns rated 3.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Hereford, HEREFORDSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM, published 2009 by Penguin Books Ltd.
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Add this copy of Cockroach to cart. $78.83, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2009 by Penguin Books Ltd.
From the beginning, the style of writing is very poetic and used a lot of clever and interesting metaphors to give the reader a clearer view through the narrator's eyes. The character is very honest and quite simple-minded. He has a warped view of the world which gives the book a dark kind of humour.However, as deep as the character may get, the book itself is not great. The storyline is not particularly exciting or eventful and not much really happens to entice interest. It gets gradually faster-paced towards the end, but otherwise the only really interesting parts are memories, which can get confusing when different characters converse.The language that is used is quite simple but doesn't give much for the imagination to do. In places, it can overdo the cockroach theme and this can get confusing because you can't really tell if the character actually has super cockroach powers or if he only believes that he does. If you can get into it, then this book can provide a kind of entertainment. It's not the most conventional of stories and it doesn't have the most interesting plot lines, the way the writing style differs from other books can be the kind of challenge that you might want to sit down and take the time to figure out...
