Available Formats
The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe
By (Author) Romain Puertolas
Random House Australia
Vintage (Australia)
1st July 2014
Australia
Paperback
320
Width 157mm, Height 235mm, Spine 23mm
428g
For readers of The One-Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, a funny, charming, feel-good story about a fake fakir from India who arrives in France to shop at IKEA and unwittingly embarks on a European tour like no other. One day a fakir leaves his small village in India and lands in Paris. A professional con artist, the fakir is on a pilgrimage to IKEA, where he intends to obtain an object he covets above all others- a brand new bed of nails. Without adequate Euros in the pockets of his silk trousers, the fakir is all the same confident that his counterfeit 100-Euro note (printed on one side only) and his usual bag of tricks will suffice. But when a swindled cab driver seeks his murderous revenge, the fakir accidentally embarks on a European tour, fatefully beginning in a wardrobe of the iconic Swedish retailer. As his journey progresses in the most unpredictable of ways, the fakir finds unlikely friends in even unlikelier places. To his surprise the stirrings of love well up in the heart of our hero, even as his adventures lead to profound and moving questions of the perils of emigration and the universal desire to seek a better life
Romain Puertolas was born in Montpellier and has lived in France, Spain and the U.K., where he has been a DJ, singer-songwriter, language teacher, translator-interpreter and steward. He has been working as a police inspector with the French border service, specialising in document fraud. The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir... was a #1 bestseller in France and has been sold to 35 countries.