Son of Nobody

Son of Nobody is an ambitious literary novel that connects an overlooked soldier of the Trojan War with a modern classics scholar. Harlow Donne leaves his wife and young daughter in Canada for an academic opportunity at Oxford, where he discovers fragments of a lost Greek epic, The Psoad. The poem follows Psoas of Midea, a goatherd’s son and ordinary foot soldier who leaves his family to fight at Troy. Through the reconstructed poem and Harlow’s personal footnotes, Yann Martel explores ambition, absence, love, grief, family responsibility, memory, and the way stories shape what we accept as history.