Son of Nobody by Yann Martel will be published in April 2026 by Jonathan Ball Publishers!

From the author of the international bestseller Life of Pi, Son of Nobody is a fabulous novel connecting the lives of a foot soldier in the Trojan War with a scholar struggling to make sense of his life in modern-day Oxford.

‘My new novel is about the Trojan War, that war that has been kicking around for 3,000 years and whose characters – Helen, Paris, Achilles, Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus, Hector and many more – we’re still talking about,’ Martel says.

‘My inspiration was Homer’s Iliad, which remains an utterly modern work. It’s a mixture of Waiting for Godot and All Quiet On The Western Front. It set my imagination on fire and the result is Son of Nobody.’

In this masterpiece of myth, history and domesticity, Son of Nobody explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them and how we live – then, now and always.

About the book

The past is never done with: always the song continues​ …

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 two-thousand-year gap between the two, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of ambition, love and grief.

Categories Fiction International

Tags Jonathan Ball Publishers New books New releases Son of Nobody Yann Martel