Why a Booktrail?
2025: The past is never done with: always the song continues
Son of Nobody
What you need to know before your trail
Harlow Donne has devoted his life to the Classical world. When a chance comes up to study an obscure collection of papyrus fragments at Oxford University, he seizes it. Though it means leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage back home in Canada, this is the kind of career break he desperately needs.
In the depths of the Bodleian Library, Harlow discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, a glimpse into the founding of Western civilization itself. He names the epic poem The Psoad, after its protagonist, a Greek commoner identified as Psoas of Midea but known to all as ‘son of nobody’.
As sole translator and interpreter of the Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, the text unlocks echoes of Ancient Greece into the present day, and a personal message to his beloved child appears. Despite the three-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love and grief.
Locations
Reset- England - Oxford
- A: University of Oxford
- B: Bodleian Library
- C: Ashmolean Museum
- Turkey - Ancient City of Troy
- D: Troy
Travel Guide
A retelling of the Trojan War
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.
BookTrail Boarding Pass: Son of Nobody
Destination/location: Oxford, Greece, Turkey (Troy) Author/guide: Yann Martel Departure Time: 2025 and the
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