Cockroach

by Rawi Hage

It’s about an immigrant who comes to Montreal and lives the life of a cockroach – which means he’s a little thief, endlessly hungry, and he’s searching for food other people are throwing out. He’s capable of getting into other people’s houses and stealing some objects just so that he can get a little bit of an entry into normal life, and he’s also lonely, loveless and an absolute outcast, almost like a non-human being. It’s gripping because it has a parallel story of the trauma that happened to the main character in his homeland.