"My name is Saad Saad, which means Hope in Arabic, Hope in English - Sad Sad" - so begins "Ulysses from Baghdad" - a new novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, one of the largest representatives of modern French prose. The hero of the novel, a young man named Saad Saad, wants to leave Baghdad, the city where his relatives and bride died under bombing, and get to Europe, which means freedom and the future for him. But how to cross the border if you do not have a dinar in your pocket?! How to survive a shipwreck, to escape from drug dealers, to resist the mesmerizing singing of sirens, to escape from the cyclops-prisoner, to get rid of the sorcery of the Sicilian Calypso . So, gradually, step by step unfolds a cruel, tragic and at the same time funny odyssey of a refugee, one of those hundreds of thousands who were forced to leave their homes. E. -E. Schmitt - a brilliant storyteller - makes the reader bewitched to follow the curves of the plot, reminiscent of the wanderings of the Homer hero, the tales of "A Thousand and One Nights" Schmitt, a humanist philosopher, makes him wonder what the boundaries really are for humanity at the beginning of the third millennium.