Son of Nobody

From the author of the international bestseller Life of Pi comes a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War, seen through the eyes of two very different outsiders: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar.

The Psoad is an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows Psoas of Midea, the son of a goatherd, who leaves his family behind to fight with the Greeks at Troy. His story, long forgotten by history, is rediscovered nearly thirty centuries later by Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford.

As the sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem—and its footnotes—to his daughter, Helen. Under his careful eye, a personal message emerges from the ancient text, like a palimpsest bridging millennia. Despite the distance of time and place, the lives of Psoas and Harlow are bound by the same threads: longing, regret, love, ambition, and grief.

Son of Nobody sweeps readers from the plains of Troy to the halls of Oxford, blending the classical with the contemporary, the epic with the intimate. It is a dazzling exploration of myth, history, and domesticity, examining how stories endure, the costs of preserving them, and the timeless human experiences they carry.

Includes 6 illustrations and 4 maps