Son of Nobody

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were not the only ancient tales of the Trojan War. In Son of Nobody, Yann Martel composes a new epic, the Psoad, in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight at Troy. Psoas meets his doom and the poem of his life is lost—until a Canadian academic studying at Oxford, Harlow Donne, discovers its relics thirty centuries later. As Harlow assembles and comments on the fragments in footnotes, he retrieves memories of his wife and daughter and grapples with questions of ambition, family, and responsibility in both the ancient and modern worlds.

A brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from two commoners: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar. Readers of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Emily Wilson’s The Iliad will revel in this breathtaking feat of the imagination.