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Son of Nobody
From the author of the international bestseller Life of Pi, a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from two commoners: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were not the only ancient tales of the Trojan War. In Son of Nobody, Yann Martel composes a new the Psoad, an epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight at Troy. Psoas meets his doom and the poem of his life is lost—until a Canadian academic studying at Oxford, Harlow Donne, discovers its relics thirty centuries later. As Harlow assembles and comments on the fragments in footnotes, he retrieves memories of his wife and daughter and grapples with questions of ambition, family, and responsibility in both the ancient and modern worlds. Son of Nobody upends the regal perspective of traditional epics and shows that “the past is never done with, that always there are parallels and returns and repetitions, always the song continues.” Readers of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Emily Wilson’s The Iliad will revel in this breathtaking feat of the imagination.
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were not the only ancient tales of the Trojan War. In Son of Nobody, Yann Martel composes a new the Psoad, an epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight at Troy. Psoas meets his doom and the poem of his life is lost—until a Canadian academic studying at Oxford, Harlow Donne, discovers its relics thirty centuries later. As Harlow assembles and comments on the fragments in footnotes, he retrieves memories of his wife and daughter and grapples with questions of ambition, family, and responsibility in both the ancient and modern worlds. Son of Nobody upends the regal perspective of traditional epics and shows that “the past is never done with, that always there are parallels and returns and repetitions, always the song continues.” Readers of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Emily Wilson’s The Iliad will revel in this breathtaking feat of the imagination.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published March 31, 2026
534 people are currently reading
27247 people want to read
About the author
Yann Martel
39 books5,414 followersYann Martel is a Canadian author who wrote the Man Booker Prize–winning novel Life of Pi, an international bestseller published in more than 50 territories. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide and spent more than a year on the bestseller lists of the New York Times and The Globe and Mail, among many other best-selling lists. Life of Pi was adapted for a movie directed by Ang Lee, garnering four Oscars including Best Director and winning the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score.
Martel is also the author of the novels The High Mountains of Portugal, Beatrice and Virgil, and Self, the collection of stories The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and a collection of letters to Canada's Prime Minister 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. He has won a number of literary prizes, including the 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the 2002 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature.
Martel lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with writer Alice Kuipers and their four children. His first language is French, but he writes in English.
Martel is also the author of the novels The High Mountains of Portugal, Beatrice and Virgil, and Self, the collection of stories The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, and a collection of letters to Canada's Prime Minister 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. He has won a number of literary prizes, including the 2001 Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and the 2002 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature.
Martel lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, with writer Alice Kuipers and their four children. His first language is French, but he writes in English.
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Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Wooof, this is one ambitious novel: Martel creates an epic poem about the Trojan War that offers if not alternative history, then alternative myth to The Iliad, and frames it with a story about the trials and tribulations of a contemporary classicist. The clue: While Homer sings of the glory of gods, heroes, and the nobility, Martel sings about the destiny of commoners, the sons of nobody, while highlighting the eternal truths about the human condition contained in an almost 3,000 year-old story: Our blind wrath leads to madness and total destruction.
The novel's protagonist and narrator Harlow Donne, a PhD candidate who researches Homer at a small Canadian university, receives a scholarship for Oxford University and temporarily leaves behind his wife and nine-year-old daughter Helen (like Helen of Troy, get it?). There, he coincidentally comes across four ostraka that point him to the story of Psoas of Midea a.k.a. the title-giving son of nobody, a common Greek soldier. The ostraka were found at Hymettus, the very place where Harlow decided to become a classicist. Intrigued (and against the wishes of his supervisor), Harlow goes on to re-construct "The Psoad", the tale of Psoad's a life as sung by Thersites, who is the only commoner mentioned in The Iliad - and there are some important differences to the official version of the war as told by the powerful. As Harlow's grandfather, traumatized by World War II, told him when he was a child: "We are hiding places for monsters".
After the story is set-up in an introductory chapter, it is told in thirty fragments from "The Psoad", with Harlow's commentary pondering the text in comparison to the "Iliad" and historical knowledge, and intertwining it with his personal story, especially the domestic disputes with his wife. His research and explanations are fully addressed to his daughter Helen, she is the driving force behind the research of this small academic laboring in a colossal, historic library - or is it obsession itself? Is it distraction veiled as purpose? Martel does a great job painting a complex, haunted narrator, who knows about the fragility of human truths, and is in many ways connected to his research subject, Psoas, who joined a war to gain loot for his wife and children, sailing off to different shores.
I have to admit that at the beginning, I was struggling with the extensive explanations about history and myth, but once I got into the flow of the novel, it gained momentum. There's also more than one instance when the combination of the timelines feels overly forced and you see the twist in the contemporary timeline coming from a mile away, but this text is so insanely ambitious (feat. a truly absorbing epic poem!) that this doesn't matter all that much. Martel said in interviews that he was inspired by Waiting for Godot (the siege of Troy lasted ten years), but I don't feel this is showing much. Rather, I see why he also references All Quiet on the Western Front, in which we see young men's spirits broken by the vastness of human cruelty. But more than anything, I felt a kinship between the protagonist of At Night All Blood is Black and Psoas.
This is a very worthwhile read and Booker bait galore, and I'm excited to discuss this in comparison to Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" (Trailer), because I have a hunch that the book might make the movie epos appear like an outdated spectacle.
The novel's protagonist and narrator Harlow Donne, a PhD candidate who researches Homer at a small Canadian university, receives a scholarship for Oxford University and temporarily leaves behind his wife and nine-year-old daughter Helen (like Helen of Troy, get it?). There, he coincidentally comes across four ostraka that point him to the story of Psoas of Midea a.k.a. the title-giving son of nobody, a common Greek soldier. The ostraka were found at Hymettus, the very place where Harlow decided to become a classicist. Intrigued (and against the wishes of his supervisor), Harlow goes on to re-construct "The Psoad", the tale of Psoad's a life as sung by Thersites, who is the only commoner mentioned in The Iliad - and there are some important differences to the official version of the war as told by the powerful. As Harlow's grandfather, traumatized by World War II, told him when he was a child: "We are hiding places for monsters".
After the story is set-up in an introductory chapter, it is told in thirty fragments from "The Psoad", with Harlow's commentary pondering the text in comparison to the "Iliad" and historical knowledge, and intertwining it with his personal story, especially the domestic disputes with his wife. His research and explanations are fully addressed to his daughter Helen, she is the driving force behind the research of this small academic laboring in a colossal, historic library - or is it obsession itself? Is it distraction veiled as purpose? Martel does a great job painting a complex, haunted narrator, who knows about the fragility of human truths, and is in many ways connected to his research subject, Psoas, who joined a war to gain loot for his wife and children, sailing off to different shores.
I have to admit that at the beginning, I was struggling with the extensive explanations about history and myth, but once I got into the flow of the novel, it gained momentum. There's also more than one instance when the combination of the timelines feels overly forced and you see the twist in the contemporary timeline coming from a mile away, but this text is so insanely ambitious (feat. a truly absorbing epic poem!) that this doesn't matter all that much. Martel said in interviews that he was inspired by Waiting for Godot (the siege of Troy lasted ten years), but I don't feel this is showing much. Rather, I see why he also references All Quiet on the Western Front, in which we see young men's spirits broken by the vastness of human cruelty. But more than anything, I felt a kinship between the protagonist of At Night All Blood is Black and Psoas.
This is a very worthwhile read and Booker bait galore, and I'm excited to discuss this in comparison to Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey" (Trailer), because I have a hunch that the book might make the movie epos appear like an outdated spectacle.
April 9, 2026
April 8, 2026 Update I've added several paraphrased or remembered Qs&As from last night's Yann Martel interview at the Toronto Reference Library as an Addendum below.
A Workingman's Iliad 🍁
A review of the Knopf Canada audiobook ARC provided by NetGalley for the Knopf Canada hardcover/eBook/audiobook published March 31, 2026.
I'm a bit of an Iliad nut, so even with a last minute approval for this audiobook ARC edition I had no fear about managing Son of Nobody in only a few days before NetGalley reviews had to be archived.
I don't pretend to being a Homer or Iliad scholar. Most of my early reads were from pre-GR and pre-reviewing days. So I've read and/or listened to the Rieu, Fagles and Mitchell translations/adaptations and still have Watson waiting in the wings (in reserve for the next LBC I think, but now I'm tempted to start it earlier).
I have been equally, or perhaps even more fascinated, by the other readings and adaptations such as Christopher Logue's War Music, Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships, Alice Oswald's Memorial, David Malouf's Ransom, etc.
There seem to be endless possibilities in translation and adaptation. As an anecdote quoted by Alberto Manguel says, a Colombian hill village refused to return their travelling library copy of The Iliad because:
Newcomers should have no fear, Yann Martel is a steady hand in guiding you through Son of Nobody. You don't have to stress about whether or not you've read a Homer version or not. Along the way Martel points out where his fictional epic The Psoad differs from Homer's The Iliad throughout.
In Son of Nobody, Martel becomes Harlow Donne, a fictional discoverer, translator and narrator of a newly discovered Ancient Greek poetry epic which he calls The Psoad after its main character Psoas, the titular Son of Nobody, who is fighting on the side of the Greeks while they besiege Troy in their 10-year grinding stalemate of war. The Canadian Donne has a fellowship grant to work in Oxford University, England and he pieces together the lost epic from pottery and papyrus fragments from the museums there.
Son of Nobody is presented in an unorthodox style. In the audiobook, the translated poem The Psoad is narrated in its chapters by one narrator in a serious epic poetry voice. That is followed by the Footnotes voiced by the second narrator who is the voice of the researcher Harlow Donne. The complete poem segment is read first and then the footnote commentary follows for each chapters i.e. the footnotes do not interrupt the reading. I was only confused at the very beginning with the "Author's Note", which you gradually realize is not Martel's Note but rather that of his fictional Donne.
The footnotes are not just comments on the text. They tell the background story of Donne's family, his wife Gail and daughter Helen, his dealings with his Oxford mentor and his research and observations on Iliad and other Trojan related epics, etc. You will note the parallels of Donne's abandoning his family back in Canada to go off on a foreign expedition i.e. such as Odysseus leaving Penelope in Homer's The Odyssey, Agamemnon betraying his family in order to lead the invasion, etc.
What is especially terrific about Martel's Son of Nobody is that the focus of The Psoad is on a common man, a son of nobody, a cheesemaker in his earlier Greek life, set into the Homeric world that otherwise mostly only spoke of Kings, Princes, Heroes and Gods. Many of the regular Iliad characters still appear, but often in cameo roles only. The main figure on the Trojan side is not even Hector, but an entirely different son of Priam.
Martel takes the opportunity to explode the myths around the Trojan War. The Iliad can be interpreted as a propaganda piece manipulated by the Achaeans (i.e. Agamemnon and Menelaus) to justify their campaign of looting a rich neighbouring kingdom by an invented story of the abduction of Helen of Troy. There is no honour or glory behind it at all. It is blood and sacrifice by the foot soldiers in the trenches to satisfy the greed of the rulers.
The even greater irony or tragedy to this is that even though Martel worked on this book for the past 10 years it has been published exactly at a time when a modern day "mad king" is lying and foaming at the mouth in order to justify his own reckless overseas campaign of war crimes in the quest for loot (whether through oil or manipulation of the stock market / currency / commodities trading and betting).
This was a 5-star experience for all the above reasons and the performance of the narrators enhanced it even further. I look forward to reading this in print.
My thanks to Knopf Canada and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this ARC copy of the audiobook, in exchange for which I provide this honest review.
p.s. I'm going to a talk by Yann Martel tomorrow at the Toronto Reference Library, so some further notes may be added to this review as an addendum afterwards.
Addendum
These are as best remembered but with a lot of paraphrasing. Very roughly in order. The interview was one hour. I have added links to the books when mentioned and the dates of publication which Martel did not actually say.
Q: Did Stephen Harper ever answer your letters and book gifts from 101 Letters to a Prime Minister: The Complete Letters to Stephen Harper (2011)? A: No, never.
Q: Would you send books to Mark Carney? A: I think Carney is already a more enlightened individual.
Q: Why is Son of Nobody structured like it is? A: The style of the book wasn't inspired by Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) (also a poem with lots of footnotes), which is what most people think, but more from reading The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso (1320) where the extended footnotes are needed to explain who are all these people that Dante is talking about.
Q: Have you read a lot of Homer? A: I had never read Homer until my wife suggested that I read the Stephen Mitchell translation The Iliad: The Stephen Mitchell Translation (2011). Mitchell's version is leaner as he cuts out a lot of the endless repetitions of "swift-footed Achilles" and "horse-taming Hector," which were needed in the Ancient Greek for the metre, but which get really tiresome in English.
I wrote Son of Nobody on the assumption that the reader had not read Homer's The Iliad, so I tried to provide enough background to it.
Q: Has success changed you as a writer? A: Not at all, except that it has allowed me to provide for my family. Each book is still a journey where I seek to answer a question.
Q (Audience): From what book did you learn the most from asking a question? A: My first book Self (1996) and its exploration of gender fluidity.
Q: Why does Life of Pi (2001) take place over 227 days? A: I chose it because 227 is a prime number, divisible only by itself and 1. An audience member once asked me that as well and then to my surprise said that 22 divided by 7 is Pi (i.e. 3.14...) , so I learn things about my books from my audience that I never even thought of.
Lightning Round:
Q: What were your favourite jobs before you became a writer? A: A tree planter in Northern Ontario, then a dishwasher, and was also a security guard at the Canadian Embassy in Paris, an easy job since most people love us 🍁.
Q: What is the most non-writerly thing about you? A: Everything, I am a slow, slothful kind of writer and not anything like the image I have of how a writer should be.
Q: Which books have you re-read many times? A: Kafka: The Metamorphosis (1915), Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
Q: What famous book have you never read? A: I read a lot of long books between writing. The next one will be Middlemarch (1872), which was a toss-up with Don Quixote (1615).
Q: On a desert island, what food would you take if you could only have one meal choice? A: First answer "tacos," because of fond memories of eating them with my parents / but then on second thought "sushi."
Q: On a desert island, what film/vhs/dvd/bluray would you take if you could only have one? Answer: "How to Build a Raft."
Q: (Fumbled): Matt Damon was in Good Will Hunting directed by Ang Lee who directed Life of Pi and now Matt Damon will be in the new Christopher Nolan film The Odyssey, so are you best friends with Matt Damon?
Audience: Good Will Hunting was directed by Gus Van Sant!
Interviewer: Oh I guess I messed up my final question.
A Workingman's Iliad 🍁
A review of the Knopf Canada audiobook ARC provided by NetGalley for the Knopf Canada hardcover/eBook/audiobook published March 31, 2026.
I'm a bit of an Iliad nut, so even with a last minute approval for this audiobook ARC edition I had no fear about managing Son of Nobody in only a few days before NetGalley reviews had to be archived.
I don't pretend to being a Homer or Iliad scholar. Most of my early reads were from pre-GR and pre-reviewing days. So I've read and/or listened to the Rieu, Fagles and Mitchell translations/adaptations and still have Watson waiting in the wings (in reserve for the next LBC I think, but now I'm tempted to start it earlier).
I have been equally, or perhaps even more fascinated, by the other readings and adaptations such as Christopher Logue's War Music, Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls, Natalie Haynes' A Thousand Ships, Alice Oswald's Memorial, David Malouf's Ransom, etc.
There seem to be endless possibilities in translation and adaptation. As an anecdote quoted by Alberto Manguel says, a Colombian hill village refused to return their travelling library copy of The Iliad because:
They explained that Homer’s story reflected their own: it told of a war-torn country in which mad gods mix with men and women who never know exactly what the fighting is about, or when they will be happy, or why they will be killed.
Newcomers should have no fear, Yann Martel is a steady hand in guiding you through Son of Nobody. You don't have to stress about whether or not you've read a Homer version or not. Along the way Martel points out where his fictional epic The Psoad differs from Homer's The Iliad throughout.
In Son of Nobody, Martel becomes Harlow Donne, a fictional discoverer, translator and narrator of a newly discovered Ancient Greek poetry epic which he calls The Psoad after its main character Psoas, the titular Son of Nobody, who is fighting on the side of the Greeks while they besiege Troy in their 10-year grinding stalemate of war. The Canadian Donne has a fellowship grant to work in Oxford University, England and he pieces together the lost epic from pottery and papyrus fragments from the museums there.
Son of Nobody is presented in an unorthodox style. In the audiobook, the translated poem The Psoad is narrated in its chapters by one narrator in a serious epic poetry voice. That is followed by the Footnotes voiced by the second narrator who is the voice of the researcher Harlow Donne. The complete poem segment is read first and then the footnote commentary follows for each chapters i.e. the footnotes do not interrupt the reading. I was only confused at the very beginning with the "Author's Note", which you gradually realize is not Martel's Note but rather that of his fictional Donne.
The footnotes are not just comments on the text. They tell the background story of Donne's family, his wife Gail and daughter Helen, his dealings with his Oxford mentor and his research and observations on Iliad and other Trojan related epics, etc. You will note the parallels of Donne's abandoning his family back in Canada to go off on a foreign expedition i.e. such as Odysseus leaving Penelope in Homer's The Odyssey, Agamemnon betraying his family in order to lead the invasion, etc.
What is especially terrific about Martel's Son of Nobody is that the focus of The Psoad is on a common man, a son of nobody, a cheesemaker in his earlier Greek life, set into the Homeric world that otherwise mostly only spoke of Kings, Princes, Heroes and Gods. Many of the regular Iliad characters still appear, but often in cameo roles only. The main figure on the Trojan side is not even Hector, but an entirely different son of Priam.
Martel takes the opportunity to explode the myths around the Trojan War. The Iliad can be interpreted as a propaganda piece manipulated by the Achaeans (i.e. Agamemnon and Menelaus) to justify their campaign of looting a rich neighbouring kingdom by an invented story of the abduction of Helen of Troy. There is no honour or glory behind it at all. It is blood and sacrifice by the foot soldiers in the trenches to satisfy the greed of the rulers.
The even greater irony or tragedy to this is that even though Martel worked on this book for the past 10 years it has been published exactly at a time when a modern day "mad king" is lying and foaming at the mouth in order to justify his own reckless overseas campaign of war crimes in the quest for loot (whether through oil or manipulation of the stock market / currency / commodities trading and betting).
This was a 5-star experience for all the above reasons and the performance of the narrators enhanced it even further. I look forward to reading this in print.
My thanks to Knopf Canada and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to this ARC copy of the audiobook, in exchange for which I provide this honest review.
p.s. I'm going to a talk by Yann Martel tomorrow at the Toronto Reference Library, so some further notes may be added to this review as an addendum afterwards.
Addendum
These are as best remembered but with a lot of paraphrasing. Very roughly in order. The interview was one hour. I have added links to the books when mentioned and the dates of publication which Martel did not actually say.
Q: Did Stephen Harper ever answer your letters and book gifts from 101 Letters to a Prime Minister: The Complete Letters to Stephen Harper (2011)? A: No, never.
Q: Would you send books to Mark Carney? A: I think Carney is already a more enlightened individual.
Q: Why is Son of Nobody structured like it is? A: The style of the book wasn't inspired by Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962) (also a poem with lots of footnotes), which is what most people think, but more from reading The Divine Comedy: Inferno - Purgatorio - Paradiso (1320) where the extended footnotes are needed to explain who are all these people that Dante is talking about.
Q: Have you read a lot of Homer? A: I had never read Homer until my wife suggested that I read the Stephen Mitchell translation The Iliad: The Stephen Mitchell Translation (2011). Mitchell's version is leaner as he cuts out a lot of the endless repetitions of "swift-footed Achilles" and "horse-taming Hector," which were needed in the Ancient Greek for the metre, but which get really tiresome in English.
I wrote Son of Nobody on the assumption that the reader had not read Homer's The Iliad, so I tried to provide enough background to it.
Q: Has success changed you as a writer? A: Not at all, except that it has allowed me to provide for my family. Each book is still a journey where I seek to answer a question.
Q (Audience): From what book did you learn the most from asking a question? A: My first book Self (1996) and its exploration of gender fluidity.
Q: Why does Life of Pi (2001) take place over 227 days? A: I chose it because 227 is a prime number, divisible only by itself and 1. An audience member once asked me that as well and then to my surprise said that 22 divided by 7 is Pi (i.e. 3.14...) , so I learn things about my books from my audience that I never even thought of.
Lightning Round:
Q: What were your favourite jobs before you became a writer? A: A tree planter in Northern Ontario, then a dishwasher, and was also a security guard at the Canadian Embassy in Paris, an easy job since most people love us 🍁.
Q: What is the most non-writerly thing about you? A: Everything, I am a slow, slothful kind of writer and not anything like the image I have of how a writer should be.
Q: Which books have you re-read many times? A: Kafka: The Metamorphosis (1915), Hemingway: The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
Q: What famous book have you never read? A: I read a lot of long books between writing. The next one will be Middlemarch (1872), which was a toss-up with Don Quixote (1615).
Q: On a desert island, what food would you take if you could only have one meal choice? A: First answer "tacos," because of fond memories of eating them with my parents / but then on second thought "sushi."
Q: On a desert island, what film/vhs/dvd/bluray would you take if you could only have one? Answer: "How to Build a Raft."
Q: (Fumbled): Matt Damon was in Good Will Hunting directed by Ang Lee who directed Life of Pi and now Matt Damon will be in the new Christopher Nolan film The Odyssey, so are you best friends with Matt Damon?
Audience: Good Will Hunting was directed by Gus Van Sant!
Interviewer: Oh I guess I messed up my final question.
April 18, 2026
This is a novel about a man who is unable to find a balance between his work and family life. He discovers a lost epic about a common soldier from The Iliad, which may seem like a more important job, but the underlying regrets remain the same when you leave your family behind. I liked its structure - part epic poem, part notes mostly about his personal life - and there was nothing difficult about it. I actually find this book quite mainstream-friendly, even if it looks more elitist at first sight.
December 22, 2025
As a lover of Greek mythology, I was so excited to receive the ARC of Son of Nobody! This was truly an original novel, both in the structure and the alternative account of The Trojan War.
Rather than the increasingly common retellings, Martel imagines The Trojan War through the experience of a long forgotten soldier; he was no Agamemnon or Achilles, just a man fighting a decade long war away from home. Harlow, the academic that discovers his version of events, is also a long way from home at Oxford. Both men miss their wives and children, but remain dedicated to their cause, to their ultimate detriment.
Imaginative, emotional, and reflective - Son of Nobody is a book I will definitely be purchasing and recommending once it reaches shelves.
Rather than the increasingly common retellings, Martel imagines The Trojan War through the experience of a long forgotten soldier; he was no Agamemnon or Achilles, just a man fighting a decade long war away from home. Harlow, the academic that discovers his version of events, is also a long way from home at Oxford. Both men miss their wives and children, but remain dedicated to their cause, to their ultimate detriment.
Imaginative, emotional, and reflective - Son of Nobody is a book I will definitely be purchasing and recommending once it reaches shelves.
April 2, 2026
I usually don’t give 2 stars because I don’t finish books I’m not enjoying, but I wanted to give this book a fair chance, so I finished it. I love Ancient Greece and often read a play or dip into The Iliad (Robert Fagles’ is my favorite translation) and I devote every March to reading/rereading different translations of the plays, Homer, of course, and other poets, and even Greek retellings, so I was excited when I saw that this book was coming out in time for March, especially as I loved Life of Pi.
I should have loved a story about an Homeric scholar translating a newly discovered story of two commoners fighting in the Trojan War, while the scholar also chronicles the disintegration of his family in the footnotes; to my dismay I did not. The scholar, Harlow Donne (that name should have been my first clue that this would not work for me) and his wife Gail were both unlikable people who said terrible things to each other in front of their young daughter, Helen, who we were meant to care about, but who was so underdeveloped it was difficult to feel any sympathy for her. Unlikable characters are not a problem, but boring characters are. I can forgive myself for letting the name Harlow Donne pass, but when I read on page 2, “The drawers had thin silver handles that invited my fingers to hook them,” I should have closed the book. That I didn’t is on me.
Knowing that Harlow Donne is an unreliable character, and translator, did not make the inconsistencies in the book make sense: the poem was remarkably developed for having been translated from only thirty fragments; the language in which Harlow Donne writes the poem is unserious, far too casual for a scholar invited to work for a year at Oxford; the alternate history speculations about the real story of Helen and Menelaus, and Helen and Paris, and what trick the Argives really used to open the gates of Troy were fun, I guess, although I’m not sure what they added to the Martel/Donne theory that Psoas, the subject of the poem, was a forerunner of Jesus, but Hades crying when presented with the body of a dead child was just ridiculous and evidence that the author is unfamiliar with Greek mythology.
I think the book suffered from my expectations. The Iliad is a magnificent epic: vivid, visceral, and thrilling, even when describing the actions of soldiers only mentioned once. There are only a few heroes: Achilles, Patroclus, Diomedes, Ajax, Hector, Aeneas, Sarpedon, and Penthesileia are names we all know, but there are countless names of men (over 1000 individuals named according to Google,) mentioned only once, who die inglorious deaths. The Iliad is also moving, it explores universal experiences of ambition, love, hubris, crushing grief, blind rage, nobility in defeat and hollow victory. The Psoad could have been written in the formal style of the classics and still told the story of a common soldier’s grief and loss and The Son of Nobody should have been able to touch this reader with it’s story of misguided ambition, grief and loss, but for me, it did not.
I should have loved a story about an Homeric scholar translating a newly discovered story of two commoners fighting in the Trojan War, while the scholar also chronicles the disintegration of his family in the footnotes; to my dismay I did not. The scholar, Harlow Donne (that name should have been my first clue that this would not work for me) and his wife Gail were both unlikable people who said terrible things to each other in front of their young daughter, Helen, who we were meant to care about, but who was so underdeveloped it was difficult to feel any sympathy for her. Unlikable characters are not a problem, but boring characters are. I can forgive myself for letting the name Harlow Donne pass, but when I read on page 2, “The drawers had thin silver handles that invited my fingers to hook them,” I should have closed the book. That I didn’t is on me.
Knowing that Harlow Donne is an unreliable character, and translator, did not make the inconsistencies in the book make sense: the poem was remarkably developed for having been translated from only thirty fragments; the language in which Harlow Donne writes the poem is unserious, far too casual for a scholar invited to work for a year at Oxford; the alternate history speculations about the real story of Helen and Menelaus, and Helen and Paris, and what trick the Argives really used to open the gates of Troy were fun, I guess, although I’m not sure what they added to the Martel/Donne theory that Psoas, the subject of the poem, was a forerunner of Jesus, but Hades crying when presented with the body of a dead child was just ridiculous and evidence that the author is unfamiliar with Greek mythology.
I think the book suffered from my expectations. The Iliad is a magnificent epic: vivid, visceral, and thrilling, even when describing the actions of soldiers only mentioned once. There are only a few heroes: Achilles, Patroclus, Diomedes, Ajax, Hector, Aeneas, Sarpedon, and Penthesileia are names we all know, but there are countless names of men (over 1000 individuals named according to Google,) mentioned only once, who die inglorious deaths. The Iliad is also moving, it explores universal experiences of ambition, love, hubris, crushing grief, blind rage, nobility in defeat and hollow victory. The Psoad could have been written in the formal style of the classics and still told the story of a common soldier’s grief and loss and The Son of Nobody should have been able to touch this reader with it’s story of misguided ambition, grief and loss, but for me, it did not.
April 4, 2026
Ambition, grief, and regret in a reimagining of the Trojan war and its modern-day counterpart.
“History, however true, needs interpreting, and fiction, however invented, arises from life and reflects it.”
In Son of Nobody, Yann Martel returns to big, ambitious storytelling, this time weaving together the ancient and the modern in a novel that is as formally inventive as it is emotionally resonant.
The more you know about Greek mythology - particularly epics like The Iliad and The Odyssey - the more you may get out of this, but even without that background (speaking as someone who studied Latin instead of Greek), the novel remains both intriguing and hauntingly beautiful. At its core is Harlow Donne, an academic who abandons his life in Canada - including his wife, his daughter, and his familial responsibilities - for the opportunity to study a newly discovered ancient Greek text in Oxford at great personal cost.
That text, the Psoad, tells the story of a foot soldier in the Trojan War called Psoas of Midea, or "son of nobody" - a deliberate shift away from kings and heroes to the ordinary lives swallowed by epic conflict. The parallels between this unnamed soldier, far from home, and Harlow himself - equally distant from his family, equally consumed by ambition - are thoughtfully and often poignantly drawn, as is their shared dedication to their cause - and, ultimately, their tragedy and downfall.
Thematically, Son of Nobody is a fascinating reimagining of classical storytelling by creating a new, and very different, legend. By centering an ordinary soldier, Martel quietly questions the grandeur of classical myth, and Harlow's own story mirrors the cost of intellectual and personal ambition. At the same time, the novel is also structurally interesting. In print, it unfolds in a dual narrative format: fragments of The Psoad occupy the upper half of each page, while Harlow's commentary on the text, footnotes, and reflections - addressed to his daughter, aptly named Helen (I see what you did there!) - run below it on the bottom half. The two narratives both complement and continuously enhance and refine each other.
The audiobook, masterfully narrated by Robin Wilcock and Aaron Willis, is a particularly captivating way to experience the story. The use of two narrators mirrors the novel's dual structure and helps clearly distinguish between the timelines. The sections of The Psoad, in particular, benefit from the oral format, making them feel closer to how epics like The Iliad would have originally been experienced. While the audiobook inevitably loses the visual split-page experimentation, it gains clarity and flow, making the transitions between narratives easier to follow, though experiencing both formats simultaneously would offer the fullest benefit.
At its heart, Son of Nobody is not just about myth or history, but about storytelling itself - how we shape it, what we choose to preserve, and what it costs us to do so. Framed as a kind of extended message to his daughter, Harlow's narrative becomes something unexpectedly tender: a love letter from parent to child, a confession, and a meditation on regret.
Unique, thoughtful, inventive, and quietly moving.
Many thanks to Macmillan Audio for providing me with an ARC of the audiobook via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
"Son of Nobody" was published on March 31, 2026, and is available now.
“History, however true, needs interpreting, and fiction, however invented, arises from life and reflects it.”
In Son of Nobody, Yann Martel returns to big, ambitious storytelling, this time weaving together the ancient and the modern in a novel that is as formally inventive as it is emotionally resonant.
The more you know about Greek mythology - particularly epics like The Iliad and The Odyssey - the more you may get out of this, but even without that background (speaking as someone who studied Latin instead of Greek), the novel remains both intriguing and hauntingly beautiful. At its core is Harlow Donne, an academic who abandons his life in Canada - including his wife, his daughter, and his familial responsibilities - for the opportunity to study a newly discovered ancient Greek text in Oxford at great personal cost.
That text, the Psoad, tells the story of a foot soldier in the Trojan War called Psoas of Midea, or "son of nobody" - a deliberate shift away from kings and heroes to the ordinary lives swallowed by epic conflict. The parallels between this unnamed soldier, far from home, and Harlow himself - equally distant from his family, equally consumed by ambition - are thoughtfully and often poignantly drawn, as is their shared dedication to their cause - and, ultimately, their tragedy and downfall.
Thematically, Son of Nobody is a fascinating reimagining of classical storytelling by creating a new, and very different, legend. By centering an ordinary soldier, Martel quietly questions the grandeur of classical myth, and Harlow's own story mirrors the cost of intellectual and personal ambition. At the same time, the novel is also structurally interesting. In print, it unfolds in a dual narrative format: fragments of The Psoad occupy the upper half of each page, while Harlow's commentary on the text, footnotes, and reflections - addressed to his daughter, aptly named Helen (I see what you did there!) - run below it on the bottom half. The two narratives both complement and continuously enhance and refine each other.
The audiobook, masterfully narrated by Robin Wilcock and Aaron Willis, is a particularly captivating way to experience the story. The use of two narrators mirrors the novel's dual structure and helps clearly distinguish between the timelines. The sections of The Psoad, in particular, benefit from the oral format, making them feel closer to how epics like The Iliad would have originally been experienced. While the audiobook inevitably loses the visual split-page experimentation, it gains clarity and flow, making the transitions between narratives easier to follow, though experiencing both formats simultaneously would offer the fullest benefit.
At its heart, Son of Nobody is not just about myth or history, but about storytelling itself - how we shape it, what we choose to preserve, and what it costs us to do so. Framed as a kind of extended message to his daughter, Harlow's narrative becomes something unexpectedly tender: a love letter from parent to child, a confession, and a meditation on regret.
Unique, thoughtful, inventive, and quietly moving.
Many thanks to Macmillan Audio for providing me with an ARC of the audiobook via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
"Son of Nobody" was published on March 31, 2026, and is available now.
November 23, 2025
deeply sad meditation on grief and violence, beautiful stuff
April 6, 2026
Incroyable, ce livre. Je ne l’ai pas lâché de la journée.
On suit Harlow Donne, étudiant au doctorat en études classiques. Une opportunité se présente à lui : étudier une collection de papyrus en Angleterre. Il laisse tout derrière lui : sa femme et sa fille.
Donne découvre un récit perdu de la guerre de Troie, qu’il nomme la Psoade et découvre un protagoniste alors inconnu de l’Iliade, Psoas fils de personne. Il remet en question l’Iliade d’Homère et change les perspectives et les points de vue.
La retranscription de ce récit épique est alimentée par des notes de bas de page dans lesquelles on retrouve des bribes de la vie de Donne, la propre tragédie qu’il vit parallèlement à ses découvertes sur la tragédie de Psoas, cet homme oublié de l’histoire épique.
Un travail littéraire vraiment intéressant! Un livre qui demande énormément de concentration, on doit suivre le fil, relire certains passages, mais c’est une lecture très stimulante que j’aurais beaucoup de plaisir à relire.
La petite étoile en moins? J’ai trouvé ça touchant, mais pas assez?
On suit Harlow Donne, étudiant au doctorat en études classiques. Une opportunité se présente à lui : étudier une collection de papyrus en Angleterre. Il laisse tout derrière lui : sa femme et sa fille.
Donne découvre un récit perdu de la guerre de Troie, qu’il nomme la Psoade et découvre un protagoniste alors inconnu de l’Iliade, Psoas fils de personne. Il remet en question l’Iliade d’Homère et change les perspectives et les points de vue.
La retranscription de ce récit épique est alimentée par des notes de bas de page dans lesquelles on retrouve des bribes de la vie de Donne, la propre tragédie qu’il vit parallèlement à ses découvertes sur la tragédie de Psoas, cet homme oublié de l’histoire épique.
Un travail littéraire vraiment intéressant! Un livre qui demande énormément de concentration, on doit suivre le fil, relire certains passages, mais c’est une lecture très stimulante que j’aurais beaucoup de plaisir à relire.
La petite étoile en moins? J’ai trouvé ça touchant, mais pas assez?
March 4, 2026
Not only do you need to like mythology to like this book, you need to like a fictional character’s analysis of mythology. Turns out, I do like both of those things.
April 16, 2026
This audio version was really good!
March 31, 2026
The premise of this novel sounded like it would be right up my alley - Ancient Greek myth paired with an emotional personal story and philosophical ideas about life - which is why I gave it a chance despite finding Yann Martel‘s previous novel, Life of Pi, utterly mediocre. Unfortunately, what Martel set out to do here simply did not work (for me).
I mostly enjoyed the Greek epic Martel invented for the novel, though at times it was too casual and modern for it to feel authentic (perhaps this was intended by the author to hint at its fictionality? Perhaps, though, my brain is too shaped by literary scholarship and I, like Harlow, am seeing links where there might as well be none). I absolutely adored the commentary providing background about the Greek literary and mythological tradition, as well as thinking about the implications of the alternative myth. What an interesting approach, to put into contrast two competing versions of a myth, to create another story so that, arguably, both versions lose credibility - to highlight both the subjectivity and the lack of verifiability of these ancient texts. To comment on war, on history, on personal lives and deaths. This is the kind of nerdy content that is quite interesting to me.
I know that this would have probably made the novel readable for a significantly smaller audience, but I found myself wishing that the text stayed within this realm of Ancient Greek myth and philosophical commentary. The personal storyline fell flat for me; I absolutely hated the way it was inserted into the second narrative strand. See, I love a well-executed parallel, and I enjoy academic papers / footnotes as elements of narrative design. But it seemed to me that the connection was disjointed here, that it disrupted the reading flow. To insert the personal story as footnotes but (mostly) not even link them to the quotes properly made it feel like this form was convenient for the story the novel wanted to tell but wasn’t executed thoroughly. Frankly, sometimes the insertion of personal footnotes made so little (academic) sense that I genuinely considered not finishing the novel out of frustration. Only the fact that the middle section mostly abstained from long personal ramblings made up for it. Also, I understand that the way the footnotes were formatted makes sense for the text‘s readability but it would have made more structural sense to have them below the corresponding sections and not at the end of the chapters. I suppose the personal storyline made this structure impractical.
In any case, I also really disliked Harlow as a person, and that didn’t make it easier to enjoy the personal level of the novel, especially since the other characters were not very fleshed out. Conclusion: The concept of merging the two narratives is compelling; I found the execution lacking. The three stars are for the Ancient Greek and the philosophy only.
What Martel sets out to do in this novel is quite ambitious. He creates an alternative history/myth, questions our perception of events as well as concepts of life, and entwines the historical vision with an individual loss. What I experienced was a beautifully creative if somewhat mediocrely written re-imagining of the Troyan War, intriguing meditations on life, grief, war, death, storytelling and history-making, and the lacklustre and weakly connected backstory of an aggravating narrator. At times a stimulating novel, at times frustrating, this had much more potential than it lived up to.
Thank you to Canongate and NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!
I mostly enjoyed the Greek epic Martel invented for the novel, though at times it was too casual and modern for it to feel authentic (perhaps this was intended by the author to hint at its fictionality? Perhaps, though, my brain is too shaped by literary scholarship and I, like Harlow, am seeing links where there might as well be none). I absolutely adored the commentary providing background about the Greek literary and mythological tradition, as well as thinking about the implications of the alternative myth. What an interesting approach, to put into contrast two competing versions of a myth, to create another story so that, arguably, both versions lose credibility - to highlight both the subjectivity and the lack of verifiability of these ancient texts. To comment on war, on history, on personal lives and deaths. This is the kind of nerdy content that is quite interesting to me.
I know that this would have probably made the novel readable for a significantly smaller audience, but I found myself wishing that the text stayed within this realm of Ancient Greek myth and philosophical commentary. The personal storyline fell flat for me; I absolutely hated the way it was inserted into the second narrative strand. See, I love a well-executed parallel, and I enjoy academic papers / footnotes as elements of narrative design. But it seemed to me that the connection was disjointed here, that it disrupted the reading flow. To insert the personal story as footnotes but (mostly) not even link them to the quotes properly made it feel like this form was convenient for the story the novel wanted to tell but wasn’t executed thoroughly. Frankly, sometimes the insertion of personal footnotes made so little (academic) sense that I genuinely considered not finishing the novel out of frustration. Only the fact that the middle section mostly abstained from long personal ramblings made up for it. Also, I understand that the way the footnotes were formatted makes sense for the text‘s readability but it would have made more structural sense to have them below the corresponding sections and not at the end of the chapters. I suppose the personal storyline made this structure impractical.
In any case, I also really disliked Harlow as a person, and that didn’t make it easier to enjoy the personal level of the novel, especially since the other characters were not very fleshed out. Conclusion: The concept of merging the two narratives is compelling; I found the execution lacking. The three stars are for the Ancient Greek and the philosophy only.
What Martel sets out to do in this novel is quite ambitious. He creates an alternative history/myth, questions our perception of events as well as concepts of life, and entwines the historical vision with an individual loss. What I experienced was a beautifully creative if somewhat mediocrely written re-imagining of the Troyan War, intriguing meditations on life, grief, war, death, storytelling and history-making, and the lacklustre and weakly connected backstory of an aggravating narrator. At times a stimulating novel, at times frustrating, this had much more potential than it lived up to.
Thank you to Canongate and NetGalley for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review!
Read
March 30, 2026Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody is a difficult novel to pin down. I came away from it feeling that I liked it, even admired it, but I’m not entirely convinced it’s a book for everyone.
At its core, the novel is an inventive reimagining of epic storytelling. It unfolds through a dual narrative structure: on the upper half of each page are fragments of “The Psoad,” a supposedly lost ancient epic reminiscent of The Iliad, while the lower half presents footnotes, commentary, and scenes from the life of Harlow Donne, a modern man entangled in the text’s rediscovery. This unusual format ensures that neither narrative dominates. Instead, they exist in constant dialogue, each reshaping how we interpret the other.
The “Psoad” itself offers a compelling twist on classical myth. Rather than focusing on kings, gods, and heroes, it shifts attention to the perspective of an ordinary person caught in the machinery of war. In doing so, it quietly questions the grandeur of epics like The Iliad, asking why countless lives are sacrificed for the desires of the powerful. This theme is mirrored in the modern narrative, where questions about authority, class, and obedience echo into contemporary life. Why do we follow the will of elites? Why did the Greeks fight a ten-year war for one woman? Martel draws these parallels with a clear sense of purpose.
One of the novel’s strengths lies in its intellectual curiosity. The research elements are engaging, particularly the way the text plays with gaps in historical and literary knowledge. There are also intriguing parallels to The Bible, especially in the way stories evolve, fragment, and are reinterpreted over time. I found these aspects fascinating. They add depth and invite the reader to question how much we truly know about the figures and narratives we think we understand.
That said, the dual structure didn’t entirely work for me. While some transitions between the ancient and modern narratives are seamless and clever, others feel less satisfying. I also found myself wanting more from the modern-day storyline. Harlow Donne’s perspective, while interesting, didn’t always feel as fully developed as it could have been.
I also experienced the audiobook, narrated by Robin Wilcock and Aaron Willis, and the use of two narrators is significant. It reflects the book’s dual structure and feels like a very natural way to present the story. The distinct voices can make the dual point of view easier to follow than in print, and the oral delivery of the Psoad echoes how works like The Iliad were originally performed. I particularly liked the presentation of the Psoad in audio, as it felt closer to how an epic like this would have originally been experienced, giving those sections a sense of rhythm and immediacy. While you do lose the visual split-page experiment, which is central to the book’s identity, you gain clarity in the transitions and a stronger sense of separation between the narratives. Ideally, experiencing both formats would offer the fullest appreciation of what the novel is trying to achieve.
I suspect my experience with the novel was shaped by my recent reading. Having spent time with The Odyssey, not just reading it but exploring it through different interpretations and sources, I felt better equipped to engage with Martel’s experimental approach. Without that background, I might have found the format more challenging. I also think my opinion may change positively after I do my planned deep dive into The Iliad.
Ultimately, Son of Nobody feels like a bridge between classical literature and modern storytelling. It is ambitious, unconventional, and thought-provoking, even if it doesn’t entirely land in every respect. For readers interested in reimagined epics or literary experimentation, especially those familiar with works like The Iliad, this could be a rewarding and stimulating read. Just be prepared for something a little out of the ordinary.
At its core, the novel is an inventive reimagining of epic storytelling. It unfolds through a dual narrative structure: on the upper half of each page are fragments of “The Psoad,” a supposedly lost ancient epic reminiscent of The Iliad, while the lower half presents footnotes, commentary, and scenes from the life of Harlow Donne, a modern man entangled in the text’s rediscovery. This unusual format ensures that neither narrative dominates. Instead, they exist in constant dialogue, each reshaping how we interpret the other.
The “Psoad” itself offers a compelling twist on classical myth. Rather than focusing on kings, gods, and heroes, it shifts attention to the perspective of an ordinary person caught in the machinery of war. In doing so, it quietly questions the grandeur of epics like The Iliad, asking why countless lives are sacrificed for the desires of the powerful. This theme is mirrored in the modern narrative, where questions about authority, class, and obedience echo into contemporary life. Why do we follow the will of elites? Why did the Greeks fight a ten-year war for one woman? Martel draws these parallels with a clear sense of purpose.
One of the novel’s strengths lies in its intellectual curiosity. The research elements are engaging, particularly the way the text plays with gaps in historical and literary knowledge. There are also intriguing parallels to The Bible, especially in the way stories evolve, fragment, and are reinterpreted over time. I found these aspects fascinating. They add depth and invite the reader to question how much we truly know about the figures and narratives we think we understand.
That said, the dual structure didn’t entirely work for me. While some transitions between the ancient and modern narratives are seamless and clever, others feel less satisfying. I also found myself wanting more from the modern-day storyline. Harlow Donne’s perspective, while interesting, didn’t always feel as fully developed as it could have been.
I also experienced the audiobook, narrated by Robin Wilcock and Aaron Willis, and the use of two narrators is significant. It reflects the book’s dual structure and feels like a very natural way to present the story. The distinct voices can make the dual point of view easier to follow than in print, and the oral delivery of the Psoad echoes how works like The Iliad were originally performed. I particularly liked the presentation of the Psoad in audio, as it felt closer to how an epic like this would have originally been experienced, giving those sections a sense of rhythm and immediacy. While you do lose the visual split-page experiment, which is central to the book’s identity, you gain clarity in the transitions and a stronger sense of separation between the narratives. Ideally, experiencing both formats would offer the fullest appreciation of what the novel is trying to achieve.
I suspect my experience with the novel was shaped by my recent reading. Having spent time with The Odyssey, not just reading it but exploring it through different interpretations and sources, I felt better equipped to engage with Martel’s experimental approach. Without that background, I might have found the format more challenging. I also think my opinion may change positively after I do my planned deep dive into The Iliad.
Ultimately, Son of Nobody feels like a bridge between classical literature and modern storytelling. It is ambitious, unconventional, and thought-provoking, even if it doesn’t entirely land in every respect. For readers interested in reimagined epics or literary experimentation, especially those familiar with works like The Iliad, this could be a rewarding and stimulating read. Just be prepared for something a little out of the ordinary.
April 24, 2026
The main character of this novel decides to leave his wife and precious five year old, Helen, for a year at Oxford.
He is to piece together fragments of The Iliad written by an unknown bard. The story really becomes a modern day tale of a man away from his family desperately trying to return. And just like the Iliad, many obstacles ensue.
He is to piece together fragments of The Iliad written by an unknown bard. The story really becomes a modern day tale of a man away from his family desperately trying to return. And just like the Iliad, many obstacles ensue.
April 17, 2026
It's rare that I give books one star because if I don't like something, I just won't finish it. But I had a misguided hope that this book would come together by the end! I was wrong!
This book tells three stories (a retelling of the Trojan War, a scholarly commentary, and a man's sad pathetic life). The man is not likable. The Trojan War story felt like it had been written by AI. The commentary just felt out of place. Three stories. All bad. THREE STORIES. ALL BAD.
The MC was not only unlikeable but I simply didn't care. Life's worst tragedies happened to him and I felt indifferent. Because he was so detached, boring, and honestly insufferable at times. I genuinely don't know what I was meant to get from his story or what the author intended for the reader to feel by the end.
I'm upset because conceptually, what this book set out to do was so cool. Checked so many boxes for things I SHOULD like. But the execution was just not there. This book was at best boring and at worst terribly depressing.
This book tells three stories (a retelling of the Trojan War, a scholarly commentary, and a man's sad pathetic life). The man is not likable. The Trojan War story felt like it had been written by AI. The commentary just felt out of place. Three stories. All bad. THREE STORIES. ALL BAD.
The MC was not only unlikeable but I simply didn't care. Life's worst tragedies happened to him and I felt indifferent. Because he was so detached, boring, and honestly insufferable at times. I genuinely don't know what I was meant to get from his story or what the author intended for the reader to feel by the end.
I'm upset because conceptually, what this book set out to do was so cool. Checked so many boxes for things I SHOULD like. But the execution was just not there. This book was at best boring and at worst terribly depressing.
April 21, 2026
Yann Martel spent ten years between novels. The man who gave us Pi adrift on the Pacific with a Bengal tiger required a decade to find his next lifeboat, and this time it is a shard of pottery dug out of the Bodleian Library. Small vessel. Enormous ocean.
Harlow Donne, a broke Canadian classicist on a fellowship at Oxford, pieces together fragments of a lost Greek epic he calls The Psoad, after its unlikely hero, a foot soldier from Midea named Psoas.
Pronounce it "so as," Martel instructs. The name is also a muscle, the psoas, deep in the hip, the one that connects torso to leg, the one that lets a man run or kneel.
The Iliad gave its stage to kings, queens, gods, and the occasional divine horse. The one commoner who dares open his mouth in Homer, Thersites, earns a beating from Odysseus and the jeers of the entire Greek army for his trouble. Homer was always better at managing a war than managing a democracy. Martel's gamble is to give Thersites a shadow, an invented twin. Psoas, son of nobody, who went to Troy for loot and came back with something far harder to carry.
The page is split horizontally: ancient epic verse on top, Harlow's scholarly footnotes on the bottom. Poem above, life below. Troy above, Oxford below. Three thousand years ago above, a marriage in free fall below.
The footnotes are where Harlow's daughter Helen, named with the author's characteristic lack of subtlety and absolute right to it, waits in Canada while her father translates a war. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to get the fleet to Troy. Harlow sacrifices his Helen to get to the Bodleian.
Psoas fights, loots, rages, and eventually commits acts that drag him past the usual boundary of Homeric heroism into territory the gods tend to adjudicate personally. His descent to Hades produces one of the book's most electrifying moments: the underworld's proprietor, who has received every mortal who ever lived, offers a single observation about what all those lives share.
Harlow assembles a dead man's poem while his own life dismantles itself in real time. The footnotes grow longer. The poem grows stranger. The diction of the ancient verse begins, ever so slightly, to slip out of ancient diction.
A reader with a suspicious nature will start paying close attention to inconsistencies, a funeral pyre for a man still living, an image borrowed from a different century, and wonder exactly what kind of translation is happening here, and who is writing whom.
Martel flew to Turkey and Greece to research this book, and the physical world of the bronze-age siege, the stench, the waiting, the sand, the ten years of boredom punctuated by catastrophic violence, is expressed with the weight of studied obsession.
The verse of The Psoad, written in free verse, has the cadence of something old, not pastiche-old. The line "With our feet we had to fight waves of water, while with our hands we had to fight waves of men" does what good epic poetry has always done: makes war and weather interchangeable.
Is it perfect? A strain of sentimentality keeps surfacing in the later pages, and the Christianity-as-sequel-to-Homer thread in Harlow's footnotes strains credulity. There are moments where the emotional gong is struck one time too many, as if the author, having built something intricate and strange, reaches for the accessible key out of sudden nerves.
What Martel has done here is eccentric and ambitious in equal measure. He has written a Greek epic and hidden it inside a contemporary literary novel.
Psoas went to Troy with nothing, fought with everything, and left behind a song that only exists because one lonely scholar in a famous library refused to let broken pottery stay broken.
The past,in this book, keeps sending messengers. The messengers are always nobodies. The messages always survive them.
❤️ 🇮🇱
Harlow Donne, a broke Canadian classicist on a fellowship at Oxford, pieces together fragments of a lost Greek epic he calls The Psoad, after its unlikely hero, a foot soldier from Midea named Psoas.
Pronounce it "so as," Martel instructs. The name is also a muscle, the psoas, deep in the hip, the one that connects torso to leg, the one that lets a man run or kneel.
The Iliad gave its stage to kings, queens, gods, and the occasional divine horse. The one commoner who dares open his mouth in Homer, Thersites, earns a beating from Odysseus and the jeers of the entire Greek army for his trouble. Homer was always better at managing a war than managing a democracy. Martel's gamble is to give Thersites a shadow, an invented twin. Psoas, son of nobody, who went to Troy for loot and came back with something far harder to carry.
The page is split horizontally: ancient epic verse on top, Harlow's scholarly footnotes on the bottom. Poem above, life below. Troy above, Oxford below. Three thousand years ago above, a marriage in free fall below.
The footnotes are where Harlow's daughter Helen, named with the author's characteristic lack of subtlety and absolute right to it, waits in Canada while her father translates a war. Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to get the fleet to Troy. Harlow sacrifices his Helen to get to the Bodleian.
Psoas fights, loots, rages, and eventually commits acts that drag him past the usual boundary of Homeric heroism into territory the gods tend to adjudicate personally. His descent to Hades produces one of the book's most electrifying moments: the underworld's proprietor, who has received every mortal who ever lived, offers a single observation about what all those lives share.
Harlow assembles a dead man's poem while his own life dismantles itself in real time. The footnotes grow longer. The poem grows stranger. The diction of the ancient verse begins, ever so slightly, to slip out of ancient diction.
A reader with a suspicious nature will start paying close attention to inconsistencies, a funeral pyre for a man still living, an image borrowed from a different century, and wonder exactly what kind of translation is happening here, and who is writing whom.
Martel flew to Turkey and Greece to research this book, and the physical world of the bronze-age siege, the stench, the waiting, the sand, the ten years of boredom punctuated by catastrophic violence, is expressed with the weight of studied obsession.
The verse of The Psoad, written in free verse, has the cadence of something old, not pastiche-old. The line "With our feet we had to fight waves of water, while with our hands we had to fight waves of men" does what good epic poetry has always done: makes war and weather interchangeable.
Is it perfect? A strain of sentimentality keeps surfacing in the later pages, and the Christianity-as-sequel-to-Homer thread in Harlow's footnotes strains credulity. There are moments where the emotional gong is struck one time too many, as if the author, having built something intricate and strange, reaches for the accessible key out of sudden nerves.
What Martel has done here is eccentric and ambitious in equal measure. He has written a Greek epic and hidden it inside a contemporary literary novel.
Psoas went to Troy with nothing, fought with everything, and left behind a song that only exists because one lonely scholar in a famous library refused to let broken pottery stay broken.
The past,in this book, keeps sending messengers. The messengers are always nobodies. The messages always survive them.
❤️ 🇮🇱
April 23, 2026
Son of Nobody is the latest from Booker Prize winner and author of Life of Pi, Yann Martel. The novel centers on Harlow Dunne, a Canadian classicist who arrives at Oxford on an academic fellowship where he discovers a lost Greek epic poem among piles of papyri concerning Psoas, a common soldier who fought in the Trojan War. The book is Dunne's "published" translation of the poem, a retelling of The Iliad littered with footnotes that range wildly from textual criticism to injections of Dunne's personal life. Like Psoas (and Odysseus, for that matter), Dunne is far from home, missing his wife and daughter, and obsessed with his legacy.
Near the beginning, Dunne (or Martel?) writes, "We're all footnotes to a greater story." Quite literally in this book, as Dunne's personal life both unfolds and unravels in citations. Yet, for all its potential, the novel feels hollow. Dunne is a thoroughly unlikable character, and while stories help us make sense of suffering, Martel treats them as instruments created out of desperate necessity in service of survival, identity, or belief.
I'm not averse to stories about tragedy. What I dislike are those stories that seem to revel in it, which is how I'd categorize this one. The image that came to mind as I finished it was that of someone looking at a pile of ash and sweeping their arm in a hopeless shrug: this is all there is. If we are footnotes to a greater story, what a burden it is to be responsible for crafting that story ourselves and demystifying the world around us. Who can bear it? Especially if story is little more than veiled ideology.
Stories are powerful because they transform our circumstances, daring us to believe that what we're facing is not, in fact, the final word. That's the kind of story I want to be a footnote in. It's also the kind of story I prefer to read.
Near the beginning, Dunne (or Martel?) writes, "We're all footnotes to a greater story." Quite literally in this book, as Dunne's personal life both unfolds and unravels in citations. Yet, for all its potential, the novel feels hollow. Dunne is a thoroughly unlikable character, and while stories help us make sense of suffering, Martel treats them as instruments created out of desperate necessity in service of survival, identity, or belief.
I'm not averse to stories about tragedy. What I dislike are those stories that seem to revel in it, which is how I'd categorize this one. The image that came to mind as I finished it was that of someone looking at a pile of ash and sweeping their arm in a hopeless shrug: this is all there is. If we are footnotes to a greater story, what a burden it is to be responsible for crafting that story ourselves and demystifying the world around us. Who can bear it? Especially if story is little more than veiled ideology.
Stories are powerful because they transform our circumstances, daring us to believe that what we're facing is not, in fact, the final word. That's the kind of story I want to be a footnote in. It's also the kind of story I prefer to read.
April 5, 2026
3,5 rounded up for originality and courage.
Howard Dunne, a Canadian Homeric researcher, receives a scholarship to Oxford. He leaves his wife and daughter Helen behind in Canada, even if the wife has her own career. While at Oxford, he discovers, in the famous Oxyrhynchus Papyri, fragments of an alternative, possibly older, version of the Iliad. To the dismay of his professor, he abandons his subject and proceeds to piece together the story of the mysterious Psoas of Midea.
Up to here it's all very intriguing, but what followed was less compelling.
We get the Song of Psoas, essentially a retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of a commoner. Howard uses the footnotes to the epic poem to tell his own story, which has many analogies with the story (some more successful than other). He doesn't care about academic rigour and freely associates passages with bigger ideas of power, storytelling and (as to be expected from Martel) religion.
I learned some interesting things about Ancient Greece, and the book asks some critical and thought-provoking questions. But there were almost as many instances where I raised my eyebrows. The personal storyline lacked emotional depth. .
Ultimately it failed to live up to expectations, but it's fantastic there are still authors who undertake sich original and research intense projects.
Howard Dunne, a Canadian Homeric researcher, receives a scholarship to Oxford. He leaves his wife and daughter Helen behind in Canada, even if the wife has her own career. While at Oxford, he discovers, in the famous Oxyrhynchus Papyri, fragments of an alternative, possibly older, version of the Iliad. To the dismay of his professor, he abandons his subject and proceeds to piece together the story of the mysterious Psoas of Midea.
Up to here it's all very intriguing, but what followed was less compelling.
We get the Song of Psoas, essentially a retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of a commoner. Howard uses the footnotes to the epic poem to tell his own story, which has many analogies with the story (some more successful than other). He doesn't care about academic rigour and freely associates passages with bigger ideas of power, storytelling and (as to be expected from Martel) religion.
I learned some interesting things about Ancient Greece, and the book asks some critical and thought-provoking questions. But there were almost as many instances where I raised my eyebrows. The personal storyline lacked emotional depth. .
Ultimately it failed to live up to expectations, but it's fantastic there are still authors who undertake sich original and research intense projects.
April 7, 2026
Big Thanks to Netgalley, the author, and the Publisher for the advanced copy! I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own
'Son of Nobody' is a novel by Yann Martel.
The book has two plotlines, a current one with a professor and his career which collide with his family life, and a new take on Illyad by Homer.
Overall, the book is enjoyable and the narration of the audiobook was great, creating the perfect atmosphere and enhancing the emotional parts. The production of the audiobook was great as well.
The two plots technic and how they actually were connected in the end on a human level that transcends time and eons was masterfully done and the characters were deeply human, flawed and imperfect.
However, the ending was somehow a letdown with a rushed conclusion and not a payoff for the ancient manuscript.
'Son of Nobody' is a novel by Yann Martel.
The book has two plotlines, a current one with a professor and his career which collide with his family life, and a new take on Illyad by Homer.
Overall, the book is enjoyable and the narration of the audiobook was great, creating the perfect atmosphere and enhancing the emotional parts. The production of the audiobook was great as well.
The two plots technic and how they actually were connected in the end on a human level that transcends time and eons was masterfully done and the characters were deeply human, flawed and imperfect.
However, the ending was somehow a letdown with a rushed conclusion and not a payoff for the ancient manuscript.
April 1, 2026
Thank you to Canongate Books and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Harlow, an academic in Classics, discovers through a series of fragments another epic from the same world as The Iliad and The Odyssey, which he names The Psoad, after the character of Psoas, known as the 'son of nobody.'
This book is pretty unique in that it's told mainly in verse, with Yann Martel constructing his own epic in the narrative, as Harlow digs deeper into his research on The Psoad.
I'm not sure this book would be for everyone, as it's essentially an academic analysing a fictional work, albeit with him finding parallels in his own life. I'm a bit of a Classics nerd, so I enjoyed all the research and discoveries that Harrow makes about the text, even if it is fictional.
This was a book I appreciated because of it being different.
Harlow, an academic in Classics, discovers through a series of fragments another epic from the same world as The Iliad and The Odyssey, which he names The Psoad, after the character of Psoas, known as the 'son of nobody.'
This book is pretty unique in that it's told mainly in verse, with Yann Martel constructing his own epic in the narrative, as Harlow digs deeper into his research on The Psoad.
I'm not sure this book would be for everyone, as it's essentially an academic analysing a fictional work, albeit with him finding parallels in his own life. I'm a bit of a Classics nerd, so I enjoyed all the research and discoveries that Harrow makes about the text, even if it is fictional.
This was a book I appreciated because of it being different.
April 7, 2026
Een kwart eeuw na het onvergetelijke beeld van een jongen en een Bengaalse tijger op een reddingsloep (Het leven van Pi) stuurt de Canadese schrijver Yann Martel ons op een nieuwe queeste. De classicus Harlow Donne ontdekt een gebroken aardewerkscherf die de sleutel blijkt tot een onbekend epos, parallel aan de Ilias, verteld vanuit het perspectief van Psoas van Midea -gewone soldaat, zoon van niemand. Waar Homerus dichtte overhelden en goden, bezingt Martel het lot van de gewone man. Harlow stelt de fragmenten samen en voorziet ze van voetnoten vol academische context én persoonlijke beslommeringen: hij is naast classicus, ook een falende echtgenoot en vader. Gaandeweg dringen de overeenkomsten met Psoas zich onverbiddelijk op — ook hij heeft alles achtergelaten voor een zaak waaraan hij zich volledig wijdt én aan ten onder gaat. Zoon van niemand is een ambitieuze meditatie over vaderschap, vernietiging en de ijdelheid van menselijke verlangens, maar voelt te vaak geforceerd en taai aan. Een literair experiment waar je meer bewondering dan leesplezier uit haalt. Hoedje af, maar geen diepe buiging.
April 22, 2026
I really wanted to like the novel as the idea of interweaving a contemporary plot line with Ancient Greece is fresh and attractive. It's super ambitious and requires equal depth and complexity as The Iliad itself. I don't think that either of the plot lines came close to epic, especially the cheap trick with a child's death.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 31, 2026
I studied Latin in high school, not Greek, so while I didn’t read the Iliad or the Odyssey in the original language, I did read (some? most?) of the Aeneid in Latin, so I’d like to think I have a higher-than-average interest in and appreciation of foundational Western epics. That’s all to say: if this book was going to work for someone, the someone could easily have been me. And while I enjoyed this enough to finish it (which is high praise- I’m DNFing ruthlessly this year), I didn’t find myself eagerly reaching for it, but rather mostly reading out of a sense of obligation.
That’s a lot about me, and not much about the book itself, I guess. So here’s a bit about Son of Nobody. It has an unusual structure: the top half of the page is the newly uncovered lost epic that’s being pieced together and translated by our main character, Harlow, and the bottom half is footnotes, half of which explain or comment on the text of the epic, and half of which tell the story of his family drama that is taking place concurrently with his scholarly work. I thought this quirky structure was pretty cool, it didn’t bother me, it was fun and fine. I did quite enjoy the “new epic,” which told the story of the Trojan War focused on the perspectives of the commoner soldiers, as opposed to Homer’s version, which takes the upper class POV. I liked the footnotes that explained key points in the epic, though I guess I couldn’t help but constantly think about the fact that Martel wrote both the epic and the “scholar’s” commentary on the epic, so it would be like “what the bard probably means here is…” and I’d be like, but you are the bard, and the scholar, you are both Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi. But still, it was interesting enough and clearly Martel has an impressively deep knowledge of Classics and ancient civilizations that I still quite appreciated it. The family drama story was a bit less compelling for me, at least until the very end, which was pretty good, but nothing incredible.
Overall, I think this book would be fantastic to teach alongside The Iliad in a classroom setting, but I’m not shoving it into the hands of my friends and family with any great haste.
That’s a lot about me, and not much about the book itself, I guess. So here’s a bit about Son of Nobody. It has an unusual structure: the top half of the page is the newly uncovered lost epic that’s being pieced together and translated by our main character, Harlow, and the bottom half is footnotes, half of which explain or comment on the text of the epic, and half of which tell the story of his family drama that is taking place concurrently with his scholarly work. I thought this quirky structure was pretty cool, it didn’t bother me, it was fun and fine. I did quite enjoy the “new epic,” which told the story of the Trojan War focused on the perspectives of the commoner soldiers, as opposed to Homer’s version, which takes the upper class POV. I liked the footnotes that explained key points in the epic, though I guess I couldn’t help but constantly think about the fact that Martel wrote both the epic and the “scholar’s” commentary on the epic, so it would be like “what the bard probably means here is…” and I’d be like, but you are the bard, and the scholar, you are both Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi. But still, it was interesting enough and clearly Martel has an impressively deep knowledge of Classics and ancient civilizations that I still quite appreciated it. The family drama story was a bit less compelling for me, at least until the very end, which was pretty good, but nothing incredible.
Overall, I think this book would be fantastic to teach alongside The Iliad in a classroom setting, but I’m not shoving it into the hands of my friends and family with any great haste.
April 24, 2026
“And so the conclusion: life is a walk, and while our bodies are solid, our joints are strong, and our vision is clear, yet we walk on feet of dreams.”
March 19, 2026
4.5 stars
lucky enough to get this early
smartly formatted
creation of his own ancient greek epic like what
you can’t help but root for the protagonist
sad and real
lucky enough to get this early
smartly formatted
creation of his own ancient greek epic like what
you can’t help but root for the protagonist
sad and real
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
this book is an epic on its own!
Harlow, a doctoral historian who's specializing in Homer and his epics gets a fully funded research program at Oxford finds out that there existed an epic, parallel to the Iliad, where the protagonist was a man named Psoas, a commoner, son of nobody. A nameless bard tails psoas as he rags over the trojan war. He narrates the story in its dynamics- the blood and sweat lingering in the papyrus.
as Harlow advances through the epic, he finds out uncanny resemblances in his own life. He, a husband and a father, leaving his family and travelling miles away. Psoas, a husband and father, walking into death with no regards. a man with no title, Harlow becomes Psoas.
a warrior and a scholar- two sides of a coin.
with each scroll of papyrus, each stroke of letter, Halow's conscience rushes back to memories, his family. his wife, his daughter. the marriage that's falling apart. the fatherhood that's too passive. When Psoas goes mad with vigor in the battlefield, Harlow goes mad with the numbness of his helplessness in the gothic oxford office. he yearns for his wife, his daughter. a man who's left with choices but too weak to make any.
son of nobody is a refreshing look onto the greek epics, where the heros and gods played roles, Matel made a commoner a character of strength and courage. people mocked Psoas for every inch he stepped onto the battlefield. for every word he uttered, they mocked and degraded him. Psoas contemplated the helplessness residing inside of him, battling strangers, killing the ones that had done no harm. pooling the blood of innocents, kids.
even the kids.
the invisible bard and his tale of Psoas of Midea, Son of Nobody, embarks the inner realms of the conscience of a common man in the battle field, the one's who were played puppets by the power. an epic, it stands as a testimony of the human nature.
too good to be fiction.
and the stark similarities of the epic to the life of Harlow, who sat in that dark room, his hands strolling through the brittle papyrus, as he watched his life falling apart like a shattered sand clock.
i want to talk more and more, but i'll end up spoiling it, and i dont want it.
if you like greek epics, if u r curious about human morality, you must read this!
Harlow, a doctoral historian who's specializing in Homer and his epics gets a fully funded research program at Oxford finds out that there existed an epic, parallel to the Iliad, where the protagonist was a man named Psoas, a commoner, son of nobody. A nameless bard tails psoas as he rags over the trojan war. He narrates the story in its dynamics- the blood and sweat lingering in the papyrus.
as Harlow advances through the epic, he finds out uncanny resemblances in his own life. He, a husband and a father, leaving his family and travelling miles away. Psoas, a husband and father, walking into death with no regards. a man with no title, Harlow becomes Psoas.
a warrior and a scholar- two sides of a coin.
with each scroll of papyrus, each stroke of letter, Halow's conscience rushes back to memories, his family. his wife, his daughter. the marriage that's falling apart. the fatherhood that's too passive. When Psoas goes mad with vigor in the battlefield, Harlow goes mad with the numbness of his helplessness in the gothic oxford office. he yearns for his wife, his daughter. a man who's left with choices but too weak to make any.
son of nobody is a refreshing look onto the greek epics, where the heros and gods played roles, Matel made a commoner a character of strength and courage. people mocked Psoas for every inch he stepped onto the battlefield. for every word he uttered, they mocked and degraded him. Psoas contemplated the helplessness residing inside of him, battling strangers, killing the ones that had done no harm. pooling the blood of innocents, kids.
even the kids.
the invisible bard and his tale of Psoas of Midea, Son of Nobody, embarks the inner realms of the conscience of a common man in the battle field, the one's who were played puppets by the power. an epic, it stands as a testimony of the human nature.
too good to be fiction.
and the stark similarities of the epic to the life of Harlow, who sat in that dark room, his hands strolling through the brittle papyrus, as he watched his life falling apart like a shattered sand clock.
i want to talk more and more, but i'll end up spoiling it, and i dont want it.
if you like greek epics, if u r curious about human morality, you must read this!
March 23, 2026
Review of advance audiobook copy received from Netgalley
3.5 stars
The present day and the Greek mythology timeline did not connect for me. They would probably be excellent books separately but together? Oh baby cakes.
I found present day man child insufferable. Please tell me more how you need to go far away to study about an unknown nameless man instead of being with your wife and child. Am I suppose to compare your struggle?! Absolutely not.
Greek mythology was interesting. Had this been the only story line I would have been intrigued. The modern story line threw me out every single time.
3.5 stars
The present day and the Greek mythology timeline did not connect for me. They would probably be excellent books separately but together? Oh baby cakes.
I found present day man child insufferable. Please tell me more how you need to go far away to study about an unknown nameless man instead of being with your wife and child. Am I suppose to compare your struggle?! Absolutely not.
Greek mythology was interesting. Had this been the only story line I would have been intrigued. The modern story line threw me out every single time.
April 10, 2026
I just finished this and I'm sitting here, a little stunned, staring off into space. Wow.
This book is wildly intelligent.
You can feel it immediately in the form. The page is split, Greeks at Troy unfolding above, and below, Harlow writing footnotes to his daughter, Helen.
It's asking you to hold two realities at once, and they start speaking to each other which is utterly genius.
The structure is doing the emotional work.
The myth carries what we would expect, fate, war, inevitability, and then beneath it, this father trying to speak to his daughter in a voice that feels careful, searching, almost too late even as you're reading it.
The tension between those two layers builds subtly and you can feel it happening, hoping its inevitablity avoids Harlow & Helen.
Harlow's obsession with The Psoad, a fictional lost Greek epic Martel invents within the novel, landed hard for me. He believes he's the only one who can fully understand it, and he goes at it with this intensity that feels consuming. It reads like control. A world he can take apart, examine, make meaning from. He’s safe in that control. Real life doesn't offer the same edges. It shifts, it resists, it asks more of you than interpretation.
And yet his life keeps bleeding into the work.
The deeper he goes, the more it starts to mirror him.
Those footnotes to Helen don't feel like commentary.
They feel like an attempt. A reaching. Something unfinished trying to find its way into language.
You can sense how much he can articulate on the page, and how little of that translated into his life when it mattered most.
When Helen dies, Harlow's whole life implodes. All that diligence, all that precision, and none of it translated to the thing that actually mattered.
Those footnotes become something else entirely. They carry the weight of a conversation that can't continue. You feel the finality of it. Every word lands differently.
The Greeks above begin to echo that same truth…loss that can't be undone, timing that doesn't bend for us, the cost of not being able to return and say what you meant to say.
It hit me in a way I didn't expect. I cried.
There's something here about the limits of understanding.
About how deeply you can see something, name it, even hold it with precision, and still not live it in the moment you needed to.
That realization sits under the whole book for me now. Heavy & human.
This is one of those reads where the form, the intellect, and the emotion are all working together, and by the end, it leaves you with yourself more than with the story.
Incredible.
This book is wildly intelligent.
You can feel it immediately in the form. The page is split, Greeks at Troy unfolding above, and below, Harlow writing footnotes to his daughter, Helen.
It's asking you to hold two realities at once, and they start speaking to each other which is utterly genius.
The structure is doing the emotional work.
The myth carries what we would expect, fate, war, inevitability, and then beneath it, this father trying to speak to his daughter in a voice that feels careful, searching, almost too late even as you're reading it.
The tension between those two layers builds subtly and you can feel it happening, hoping its inevitablity avoids Harlow & Helen.
Harlow's obsession with The Psoad, a fictional lost Greek epic Martel invents within the novel, landed hard for me. He believes he's the only one who can fully understand it, and he goes at it with this intensity that feels consuming. It reads like control. A world he can take apart, examine, make meaning from. He’s safe in that control. Real life doesn't offer the same edges. It shifts, it resists, it asks more of you than interpretation.
And yet his life keeps bleeding into the work.
The deeper he goes, the more it starts to mirror him.
Those footnotes to Helen don't feel like commentary.
They feel like an attempt. A reaching. Something unfinished trying to find its way into language.
You can sense how much he can articulate on the page, and how little of that translated into his life when it mattered most.
When Helen dies, Harlow's whole life implodes. All that diligence, all that precision, and none of it translated to the thing that actually mattered.
Those footnotes become something else entirely. They carry the weight of a conversation that can't continue. You feel the finality of it. Every word lands differently.
The Greeks above begin to echo that same truth…loss that can't be undone, timing that doesn't bend for us, the cost of not being able to return and say what you meant to say.
It hit me in a way I didn't expect. I cried.
There's something here about the limits of understanding.
About how deeply you can see something, name it, even hold it with precision, and still not live it in the moment you needed to.
That realization sits under the whole book for me now. Heavy & human.
This is one of those reads where the form, the intellect, and the emotion are all working together, and by the end, it leaves you with yourself more than with the story.
Incredible.
April 15, 2026
eBook ARC - 2 Stars
Audiobook ARC narrators - 4 Stars
Thank you to NetGalley, Yann Martel, Robin Wilcock - Narrator, Aaron Willis - Narrator, W. W. Norton & Company, and RB Media for providing the eBook and audiobook ARC's in exchange for an honest review.
Audiobook ARC narrators - 4 Stars
Thank you to NetGalley, Yann Martel, Robin Wilcock - Narrator, Aaron Willis - Narrator, W. W. Norton & Company, and RB Media for providing the eBook and audiobook ARC's in exchange for an honest review.
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February 10, 2026Thank you to NetGalley and Canongate Books for an eARC in exchange for an honest review
A fascinating tragic dual timeline story of all consuming passion and loss. I was curious and a little confused for the first half, enjoying the little snippets into Harlow's life but not really seeing where it was going. And then at the half way mark I suddenly understood the point and felt my heart breaking into tiny pieces for the rest of the novel. I've read the Odyssey (many years ago now) and having a general knowledge I would almost say is essential for enjoying this because it's brimming with intertextuality and a richness of history mirrored into Harlow's present day.
A gem of a book although I will say that putting all the effort into reading 'translated' ancient greek poetry does not have as much pay off as reading the real thing, as cool as the concept is
A fascinating tragic dual timeline story of all consuming passion and loss. I was curious and a little confused for the first half, enjoying the little snippets into Harlow's life but not really seeing where it was going. And then at the half way mark I suddenly understood the point and felt my heart breaking into tiny pieces for the rest of the novel. I've read the Odyssey (many years ago now) and having a general knowledge I would almost say is essential for enjoying this because it's brimming with intertextuality and a richness of history mirrored into Harlow's present day.
A gem of a book although I will say that putting all the effort into reading 'translated' ancient greek poetry does not have as much pay off as reading the real thing, as cool as the concept is
April 20, 2026
A difficult idea, but the inventive Yann Martel makes it work. A Canadian researcher leaves his family at home on an odyssey to work on his doctorate in Classics at Oxford, where he discovers fragments of an alternate account of the Trojan War. It's a "Workingman's Iliad", from a commoner - Son of Nobody, with Homer's gods, kings, princes and heroes only providing familiar backstory to the same events the soldier witnesses. One narrator on the audiobook recites the free verse epic poem, while another voices the footnotes, commentary on history and myth, and Harlow's academic and family conflicts. Unusual, but fascinating story.
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