Cockroach, Rawi Hage’s second book, following on from the award-winning De Niro’s Game, is the story of an exiled immigrant. An unnamed protagonist lives in Montreal and has been ordered to seek psychiatric help after an unsuccessful suicide. His concerns are rudimentary: hunger, desire, survival, retribution and escape. At first, we track his attempt to revitalise his existence. A sense of entitlement and a keen awareness of his own deprivation drive him forward, as he pursues an Iranian lover and indulges his kleptomaniacal urges. He is ruled by a duality: on one hand, a formless rage at the society that has marginalised him, and on the other, an entrenched self-loathing, which manifests in a fantasy of metamorphosis from man to cockroach.

There is something feverishly disturbed and hard-hearted in his voice – a black-hole at the narrative’s centre that can be neither seen nor ignored as the reader gravitates toward it. As the plot progresses, Hage reaches back further into our antihero’s past, while in Montreal a chance for redemption is presented. Hage is a grand stylist; he has created an original and bleakly luminous novel on loss, despair and insecthood.