“My name is Saad Saad, which in Arabic means Nadezhda Nadezhda, and in English means Sad Sad,” - this is how Ulysses from Baghdad begins, a new novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, one of the greatest representatives of modern French prose. The hero of the novel, a young man named Saad Saad, wants to leave Baghdad, the city where his family and fiancée died under bombing, and get to Europe, which for him means freedom and a future. But how to cross borders if you don’t have a dinar in your pocket?! How to survive a shipwreck, elude drug dealers, resist the mesmerizing singing of sirens, escape from a Cyclops jailer, free yourself from the witchcraft of the Sicilian Calypso. So, gradually, step by step, the cruel, tragic and at the same time funny odyssey of a refugee unfolds, one of those hundreds of thousands who were forced to leave their homes.E.-E. Schmitt, a brilliant storyteller, makes the reader fascinated by the twists and turns of the plot, reminiscent of either the wanderings of a Homeric hero or the tale of the Arabian Nights; Schmitt, a humanist philosopher, makes him think about the question of what borders really are for humanity at the beginning of the third millennium.