Son of Nobody: A Novel

**For fans of Homer’s *Iliad* and *Odyssey* , a brilliantly imagined story from the author of the international bestseller *Life of Pi***
What if Homer’s epics were not the only ancient tales of the Trojan War? In *Son of Nobody* , Yann Martel composes a new legend: the *Psoad* , an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight at Troy. Unlike Odysseus’s legend, this commoner’s story was lost to time—until Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers its relics nearly thirty centuries later.
As sole translator and interpreter of the *Psoad* , Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, a personal message to his beloved child appears in the ancient text, like a palimpsest. Despite the thousands of years and hundreds of miles that separate Psoas, Odysseus, and Agamemnon from Harlow, a thread hasn’t frayed, it remains: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of love, ambition, and grief.
*Son of Nobody* takes readers from the plains of Troy to the halls of Oxford, from the classical to the contemporary, from ancient verses to modern footnotes. It is a dazzling, masterful feat of myth, history, and domesticity that explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them, and how we live—then, now, always.