Homer’s ILIAD and ODYSSEY were not the only ancient tales of the Trojan War. In SON OF NOBODY, Yann Martel composes a new legend: the Psoad, an epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight at Troy. Psoas meets his doom and the poem of his life is lost --- until a Canadian academic studying at Oxford, Harlow Donne, discovers its relics 30 centuries later. As Harlow assembles and comments on the fragments in footnotes, he retrieves memories of his wife and daughter and grapples with questions of ambition, family and responsibility in both the ancient and modern worlds.

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.