Two Blankets, Three Sheets
Amsterdam Airport, 1998.
Samir Karim steps off a plane from Vietnam, flushes his fake passport down the toilet, and requests asylum. Fleeing Iraq to avoid conscription into Saddam Hussein's army, he has spent seven years anonymously wandering through Asia. Now, safely in the heart of Europe, he is sent to an asylum centre and assigned a bed in a shared dorm — where he will spend the next nine years. As he navigates his way around the absurdities of Dutch bureaucracy, Samir tries his best to get along with his 500 new housemates. Told with compassion and a unique sense of humour, this is an inspiring tale of survival, a close-up view of the hidden world of refugees and human smugglers, and a sobering reflection of our times.
'Essential reading...I've never read a book that better illustrates the human cost of the European asylum systems...This vital, eye-opening work is essential to our collective education, as a history, as a call to action, bringing one person's suffering vividly to life in the imagination of strangers. And in the end that, as much as crafted stories and artful prose, gives literature its enduring power.' — The Guardian
'Two Blankets, Three Sheets is an interesting, rich novel on fear, insecurity, arbitrariness and hopelessness.' — Guus Bauer, author of Bird Boy
'This is an unnerving, ironical book about how lives are grinded down by endlessly stretched procedures.' — Leeuwarder Courant
RODAAN AL GALIDI is a poet and writer. Born in Iraq and trained as a civil engineer, he has lived in the Netherlands since 1998. As an undocumented asylum seeker, he did not have the right to attend language classes, so he taught himself to read and write Dutch. His novel The Autist and the Carrier Pigeon, already a bestseller in the Netherlands, is his most successful novel to date.
JONATHAN REEDER, a native of New York and longtime resident of Amsterdam, enjoys a dual career as a literary translator and performing musician. Alongside his work as a professional bassoonist he translates opera libretti and essays on classical music, as well as contemporary Dutch fiction by authors including Peter Buwalda, Bram Dehouck, Christine Otten, Adri van der Heijden, and Two Blankets, Three Sheets by Rodaan Al Galidi. His recent translations include Rivers by Martin Michael Driessen (winner of the 2016 ECI Literature Prize) and The Lonely Funeral by Maarten Inghels and F. Starik.
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