Son of Nobody
Yann Martel
Available as Hardback, Paperback, eBook, Downloadable audio
2 April 2026
From the author of the phenomenon Life of Pi, this fabulous novel connects the lives of a foot soldier in the Trojan War with a scholar struggling to make sense of his life in modern-day Oxford
The past is never done with: always the song continues
Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs.
In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilization itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea but known to all as ‘son of nobody’.
As sole translator and interpreter of the Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the three-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition and grief.
In this masterpiece of myth and history, Son of Nobody explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them and how we live – then, now and always.
“A classical scholar uncovers a lost account of the Trojan war. The translated poem unfolds at the top of the page, with heartfelt footnotes addressed to his young daughter below, in a meditation on mythmaking, homemaking and storytelling”
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guardian
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“The first novel in a decade from the author of Life of Pi. A fictional Homeric epic about an overlooked Trojan hero is interspersed with footnotes from failing academic Harlow Donne, who translates the poem for the daughter he has left behind”
2026 Fiction Highlights
observer
“The 2002 Man Booker Prize-winning author of Life of Pi retells the Trojan war by placing at its centre Psoas of Midea, a goatherd’s son and subject of The Psoad, a 3,000-year-old epic that has been rediscovered by a Canadian academic”
What To Read In 2026
financial Times
“The much-loved author of 2001’s Life of Pi is back with a new novel. Known for his ability to balance intricate narratives with epic stories philosophical questioning, Martel’s Son of Nobody connects the lives of a foot soldier in the Trojan War with an academic who has abandoned his family life for his studies. A beautiful story about what we can learn from the past when it comes to homesickness, grief, love and ambition”
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elle Magazine
“Yann Martel’s much-loved, Booker-winning Life of Pi will be hard to match but we’re intrigued by this new tale about an academic who discovers a lost account of the Trojan War with bizarre connections to his own life”
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times
Yann Martel
Yann Martel is the author of a short story collection, The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and of four novels, Self, Beatrice & Virgil, Life of Pi (for which he was awarded the 2002 Man Booker Prize), 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.