The Psoad is an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight with the Greeks at Troy. This commoner’s story was lost to time --- until Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers its relics nearly 30 centuries later. As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, a personal message to his beloved child appears in the ancient text, like a palimpsest. Despite the thousands of years and hundreds of miles that separate Psoas and Harlow, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of love, ambition and grief.

A young man experiences tremendous loss, and in his grief takes off on an adventure to rediscover an ancient artifact he believes will change the way we view the world. Years later, a pathologist with a fond love of mystery novels experiences a very strange mystery of his own. Fifty years after all these events have been set in motion, a senator finds that by rescuing a chimpanzee from a research facility, he reacquaints himself with a freedom he forgot he could experience. These three very different stories are all held together by the strings of love and loss.

When sixteen-year-old Pi Patel finds himself stranded in a lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with only a menacing 450-pound Bengal tiger for company, he quickly realizes that the only way to survive is to make sure the tiger is more afraid of him than he is of it.