Son of Nobody

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, 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, 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, with the writer Alice Kuipers, and their four children.