Son of nobody : a novel / Yann Martel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Martel, Yann, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Trojan War--Fiction.

Trojan War.

Classicists--Fiction.

Classicists.

Epic poetry, Greek--Translating--Fiction.

Epic poetry, Greek.

Mythology, Greek--Fiction.

Mythology, Greek.

Soldiers--Fiction.

Soldiers.

Families--Fiction.

Families.

Homesickness--Fiction.

Homesickness.

Genre:

mythology (literary genre)

Mythological fiction.

Novels.

Fiction.

Physical Description:

334 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : W.W. Norton & Company, [2026]

Summary:

From the author of the international bestseller Life of Pi, a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from the perspective of two commoners: an ancient soldier and a modern scholar.

"The most famous stories of the Trojan War and its aftermath are Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. But these were not the only tales of the war sung to ancient audiences by bards--there were others, now vanished but for echoes and fragments, collected in what has come to be known as the Epic Cycle. In SON OF NOBODY, one such tale is the Psoad: an epic that follows the son of a goatherd, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight on the beaches of Troy. Psoas meets his doom, and the epic poem of his life is lost to time--until another man on a foreign shore, a Canadian academic studying at Oxford, discovers its relics thirty centuries later. A truly daring feat of imagination, SON OF NOBODY is a novel composed in two voices: the first, a series of fragments from antiquity that tell the story of Troy from a lost, alt-Homeric tradition; the second, the voice of a modern-day scholar, Harlow Donne, who assembles and comments on these fragments while navigating a conflict of his own. Obsessed with his discovery, Donne still can't seem to let go of his family's past--he weaves together the tale of uncovering ancient papyri, faded codices, and broken cuneiform tablets with memories of his daughter as a child and his wife before their separation. Donne translates and writes in the heartfelt modes of Aphrodite, goddess of love, and Ares, god of war, as the parallel stories offer a poignant glimpse into both the follies of failed relationships and of battle. SON OF NOBODY upends the regal perspective of traditional epics, and by grappling with questions of ambition, family, and responsibility in both the ancient and the modern worlds, it shows "that the past is never done with, that always there are parallels and returns and repetitions, always the song continues.""-- Provided by publisher.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Green fund bookplate.

ISBN:

9781324118138

132411813X

9781923058811

1923058819

OCLC:

1519448747