Son of Nobody

In Son of Nobody, Yann Martel (author of Life of Pi) returns a decade after his last novel with an ambitious and inventive reimagining of the Trojan War. He composes a new epic, The Psoad, centred not on kings or demigods, but on an ordinary man.

As a lover of Greek mythology, I was immediately drawn to the premise. Rather than offering another straightforward retelling (there’s definitely plenty out there), Martel imagines the war from the perspective of a long-forgotten soldier. Psoas is no Agamemnon or Achilles, no figure destined for glory. He is simply a man swept up in a decade-long conflict, driven by duty, pride and the expectations of his society. His voice, rendered in spare yet lyrical verse, gives the epic tradition a striking intimacy. The scale remains grand, but the emotional focus is domestic and deeply human amid it all.

The novel is framed by Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic studying at Oxford who discovers fragments of Psoas’s lost poem. As Harlow assembles and annotates these relics in detailed footnotes, he reflects on his own life, particularly his distance from his wife and daughter. Both men are far from home, committed to intellectual or martial ambition at significant personal cost. Through this parallel, Martel explores questions of responsibility and legacy, and the tension between public achievement and private love.

The interplay between past and present is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. Martel’s text enters into conversation with The Iliad across the centuries, casting it in a new light by privileging the overlooked and the ordinary. While I would have welcomed more character development for Harlow, the novel remains a breathtaking feat of imagination. Readers of The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller and The Iliad translated by Emily Wilson will find much to admire in this bold and original epic.