Rawi Hage, Deniro's Game. The only Canadian novel I read in 2009, I came to it after reading the equally brilliant Cockroach. Is there anyone writing fiction as audacious and tough as Hage's? If so, please point them out to me.

Rawi Hage's COCKROACH, already in contention for the Giller Prize, now has a shot at Canada's Governor General's Award as well, with the nominees announced earlier today. Other fiction nominees are Rivka Galchen (born in Toronto though she lives in New York), Nino Ricci, David Adams Richards and Fred Stenson.

The best novel I read this year was Rawi Hage's COCKROACH (Hamish Hamilton), which tells the story of an ungrateful immigrant, filled with angst and attitude, in a Montreal which could be Kafka's Prague. It is a dark book, narrated with verve and brilliance. It made me jump for joy. Any writer who borrows a piece of a Capote book title is asking for it, but Daniyal Mueenuddin's IN OTHER ROOMS, OTHER WONDERS, set in worlds of rich and poor, east and west, has such razor sharpness and lyric tenderness that it gets away with it. Anyone writing "you only had to see her disjoint a chicken to know the depths and heights of her carnality" gets my vote.

With a surprising degree of humor, Hage’s second novel (after IMPAC Dublin-winner DeNiro’s Game) explores the peculiar politics of Montreal’s immigrant communities through the bleak obsessions of a misanthropic thief.

Having read both of Hage’s books, I see his talent. However, I wonder at how extravagantly he’s been praised and at how fast he’s been elevated to the status of an internationally important author.

The author specializes in turning over stones and exploring what lies beneath. “Nothing surprises me about humans,” Hage’s narrator despairs at one point. But it’s not just the underclass and the declassé that Hage puts under scrutiny. In Cockroach, Canada’s beloved moral high ground is taken down a couple of notches while its smug multiculturalism is given a hyperrealistic twist as Hage parodies popular stereotypes of the Arab huckster.

An angry book. A Marxist post-colonial look at the world. An angry nameless young man gives us a swirling tale of the depravity of powerlessness. A good read but I found it a bit one dimensional.

Morally complicated and intellectually engaged, Cockroach can easily stand on the merits of its content alone. As with DeNiro’s Game, there’s some biographical overlap between Hage and the narrator of Cockroach, but the literary allusions and fabulist touches in the new book mark it unmistakeably as fiction.

The narrator of Rawi Hage’s second novel is a nameless immigrant from a nameless war-torn country, struggling to survive in Montreal, “this city with its case of chronic snow.” The story opens shortly after his botched attempt to hang himself in a city park. This failed suicide results in court mandated therapy sessions with a naïve young counselor named Genevieve. What follows is a bleak, existentialist survival tale—the 21st century spawn of Dostoevsky and Kafka, replete with crime, drugs, and sex.

In his second novel, Lebanese-Canadian author Rawi Hage proves to critics that his talent, though raw, is genuine.

Cockroach is essentially a study of an immigrant trying to live in a foreign country, while never believing he can fit in. He does not want to be there.

Cockroach is driven by these characters, not by plot, and exhibits a natural fluidity in its storytelling. By the time the climax rolls around, we are caught up on the narrator’s past just in time to witness his future. Hage doesn’t lead us by the nose with a trail of plot-point breadcrumbs. He starves us, just enough, before throwing the whole loaf of bread in our face. We see it coming, but only once we are in the moment and it is already too late.

4. Cockroach

By Rawi Hage; W.W. Norton, $23.95, Oct. 12. Hage's DeNiro's Game won the $140,000 International Dublin IMPAC Literary Award in 2008 — so expectations are high for this second novel about an Arab immigrant forced to see a therapist after a failed suicide attempt.

Rawi Hage, the Canadian award winning author talks to CBC Radio 1's Q host Jian Ghomeshi about his 2008 Giller nominated novel 'Cockroach'.

Beyond paying homage to Kafka in the title, Cockroach is reminiscent of the Metamorphosis in that it takes place almost entirely inside the head of a character whose reality has been badly confounded. Although Hage’s book builds to a climactic finale, the real focus is on the thief’s rich fantasy life.

Hage spoke to NOW from his home in Canada about becoming a celebrated author and how being part of the Lebanese diaspora has shaped his writing.

Hage's DeNiro's Game won the $140,000 International Dublin IMPAC Literary Award in 2008 — so expectations are high for this second novel about an Arab immigrant forced to see a therapist after a failed suicide attempt.

Most fiction writers are primarily either stylists or plotters, but Hage is clearly both. There's a slight jolting sensation as the narrative shifts gear from poetic to cinematic, with guns and knives and elaborately contrived set-ups replacing the earlier evocations of drains and flesh and wintry streets, but it's all managed with great brio and expertise, and it all comes to a very satisfying climax. And if, a little later, you find yourself feeling that the book has after all raised more questions about the condition of wretchedness than its ending quite resolves, this is only further evidence of Hage's large and unsettling talent.