An Exclusive Excerpt from Yann Martel’s New Novel, Son of Nobody

An Exclusive Excerpt from Yann Martel’s New Novel, Son of Nobody

Son of Nobody—Yann Martel’s fifth book of fiction—features Harlow Donne, a classicist who leaves his daughter, Helen, in Canada and travels to Oxford, disappearing into the Bodleian Library, where he stumbles upon something scholars have long dreamed of: a lost Trojan epic. As the poem’s sole translator, Donne comes to see in its unnamed hero a mirror of his own longing, ambition, and love for his daughter. In the following excerpt, taken from t…