Waiting in his asylum shelter, Karim Mensy cannot help but marvel at an inmate who has just been released from prison. The man, a Kurdish-Iraqi called Hewe, was sent to jail after he got involved in a fist-fight with some Serbian boys. Hewe is back after four months, speaking a fluent German that his compatriots in the prison can only dream of. "You can really learn good German there," Hewe says of his stay in the city jail. After all, most prison inmates are German and one can hardly learn the language when one is segregated with other asylum seekers and forced to kill time in the refugee shelter. And all of a sudden, Karim wishes he too could spend some time in a local prison and come out speaking fluent German like his friend Hewe - for Germans are rare where Karim's refugee shelter is located. He only has his compatriots to fall back on, and all of them are as alienated and as desperate to get a whiff of normal life in the country they now live in. Khider's book is full of tragicomic, sad and downright bizarre anecdotes, which represent the desperation of people who flee their country, try to begin a new life in a foreign place and are willing to resort to every possible measure to belong to this new place that they have sometimes not even chosen to be their final destination. Take the protagonist Karim Mensy, for example. Karim's father in Iraq gave him enough money to travel to Europe and reach France, but a mix-up at the smuggling ring results in him coming to Germany - to Bavaria and to the city of Dachau, home to one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps during the Third Reich. A stark reminder of Karim - and consequently - a refugee's sense of being alienated and pushed away from a place where he wants to belong. But Karim himself has never belonged to any place, in the true sense. He did have a normal childhood in Iraq, but as he grew older, he developed a condition called gynecomastia, or enlarged breasts in men. Although he manages to hide the deformity by wearing loose clothing, he has to escape, or get conscripted into the Iraqi army and face a life of discrimination and harassment. His sole aim now is to earn enough money and get his deformity medically removed. Abbas Khider skillfully manages to tell the story of a desperate man caught in the Kafkaesque workings of the German bureaucracy, which his protagonist, Karim, literally takes hostage. Karim's prisoner at the beginning of the story is a German official called Frau Schulz, who is the target for his pent-up frustration. But what happens to Karim finally? Does he get to stay in Germany or must he leave? And what becomes of this hostage situation? Won't Karim make his problems worse? And has Karim really taken someone hostage or is he just dreaming? The author leaves the story open to interpretation. His novel reflects the absurdity of the refugee situation and to a great extent, the absurdity of the human condition. But the book is also representative of the eternal human quest for the answer to the questions: who are we and why are we here? Author: Manasi Gopalakrishnan