W. W. Norton & Company Books Son of Nobody 無人之子

“A beautiful, strikingly humane novel from the author of Life of Pi, Son of Nobody mines themes of family, regret and grief through the moving story of a Canadian Classics scholar who discovers a lost account of the Trojan war in the Bodleian Library and within it, a highly personal message.” — Waterstones

 

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.

 

In this masterpiece of myth, history and domesticity, it explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them and how we live - then, now and always. 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.”

 

Features

• Edition : -
• Binding : Hardcover
• ISBN : 9781039001503
• Publication Date : 2026/3/31

 

Materials & Care

• Imported