Son of Nobody

‘The past is never done with: always the song continues.’

Harlow Donne has sacrificed his life to the study of the Classical world. So when he is invited to Oxford University to work on an obscure collection of papyrus fragments it is an academic’s dream come true. He must leave behind his daughter and wife in Canada, but offers like this don’t come twice and he badly needs a change of fortune. Then, while studying in the Bodleian Library, he unearths a completely undiscovered account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilisation itself. He names the poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a commoner identified only as Psoas, the son of nobody.

As sole translator and author of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter Helen, allowing the text to unlock the echoes of the ancient Greeks into the present day, and to share a personal message with his beloved child. Despite the two-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn't frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love and grief.

In this masterpiece of myth, history and domesticity, Son of Nobody explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them and how we live—then, now and always.

Yann Martel is the author of a short story collection, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and of four novels, Life of Pi (for which he was awarded the 2002 Man Booker Prize), Self, Beatrice & Virgil, and The High Mountains of Portugal. Life of Pi was adapted for the silver screen by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars. Martel also ran a guerilla book club with Stephen Harper, sending the former prime minister of Canada a book every two weeks for four years. The letters that accompanied the books were published as 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. Martel lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with the writer Alice Kuipers and their four children.

'A story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction.' Los Angeles Times Book Review on Life of Pi