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

A scholar’s encounter with broken Greek pottery uncovers a forgotten Trojan story

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 the opening, he describes his discovery of the obscure papyrus fragments.

ONCE THERE WAS a clay pot and it fell and broke. Once there was a man and he too fell.

Let’s start with the first, Helen. A few years back, I came upon the jagged remains of a clay pot. This was at Oxford, where I would be spending a year. As part of my introduction to the Faculty of Classics, I had met the curator of the Classical Greece Collections at the Ashmolean Museum, a fellow Canadian as it happens. She’d invited me to have a peek at the museum’s vast trove, of which only a fraction is on public display. And so I made my way to that fine museum one September morning, still bleary-eyed with jet lag, and came to be standing in a windowless, neon-lit room with a table in the centre and walls lined with cabinets of wide, shallow metal drawers.

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The curator had time to say, “This is the Antiquities Study Room. Most of the artifacts here date from the Archaic period, that is, from the eighth to the fifth centuries BCE, when—” when her cellphone rang.

She answered and quickly looked worried. “Already?” she said, sounding flustered. “I’ll be there in a minute.” She hung up and turned to me. “Something’s come up.” She hesitated, then said, “I’ll be back shortly. You don’t have to go. Please use the nitrile gloves to handle anything.” She pointed to the box of blue rubber gloves on the table. Then she was gone.

I looked around, nonplussed. I was here purely on a social visit. I am—or, rather, was—a Homeric scholar, and Homeric scholarship is essentially textual. It’s even lighter than that: to start with, it was oral. I know about ancient pottery as much as a Homeric scholar needs to know.

The drawers had thin silver handles that invited my fingers to hook them. I chose a drawer at random, “Attic red-figure.” After the slightest resistance, it opened with a gliding smoothness as imperceptible as time itself, its slides clicking quietly as it opened fully—these were deep drawers—revealing broken clay pieces from another age, embedded in white foam and neatly arrayed in rows and columns. Most pieces were decorated with truncated drawings, but some had writing scratched on the glaze. The curator had mentioned the Archaic period. That meant these written-upon potsherds—ostraka, in the jargon of the trade—dated from after the end of that civilizational collapse lasting over 300 years called the Greek Dark Ages, when clay was starting to capture the living breath of words, the first instances of writing. This was the time when Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey were written down, the West’s very first books, after centuries of word-of-mouth transmission.

I closed the drawer, put on a pair of rubber gloves, and opened another drawer, then another. The contents of each burst into view like a landscape. I searched for ostraka with writing on them, because if old Greek pottery wasn’t my specialty, old Greek words were. I had a sound knowledge of Ancient Greek and a dogged talent for deciphering it.

Words appeared, in all the awkward glory of early writing. I felt I was in a noisy hatchery and these hatchlings were trying to say something as they tumbled over, chirping faintly, featherless wings flapping. I was reminded of you, Helen. In early grade school, you too produced writing like this—your name, stray words, simple sentences—the letters crude, the spelling phonetic.

I noticed at the back of one drawer, toward the right, a cluster of six ostraka that were plainly related, looking at the fracture lines. I picked up the largest piece. The letters were quite misshapen. This must be a theta, Θ. Was this a sigma, Σ? I turned it around in my hand. I could make it out now. Backwards? Yes, of course. What about this word? It broke off, but it continued on the next piece, though misspelled; the writer must have meant “because,” ΕΝΕΚΑ. What were these ostraka saying?

After some effort, I construed the following eight Greek words, all in capital letters, in four crooked, stacked lines:

ΝΕΑΘΥΑΤΝΕΙΜΙΕ ΕΚΑΨΟΑΝΤΟΣ ΣΑΕΔΙΜΥΟΤ ΟΥΤΙΝΟΣΥΙΟΥ

There’s an irrepressible feeling that comes off the trembly letters of early Archaic Greek writing and sails across the millennia: a giddy, nearly childish enthusiasm. Being the invention of pragmatic dabblers—illiterate Greek traders of the islands and coasts of the eastern Mediterranean who freely retooled a script used by Phoenician traders, none of them trained scribes—it shows a blissful unconcern for rules and conventions, and it goes any which way. I have seen inscriptions whose letters go right to left, left to right, vertically up, vertically down, in a spiral, sideways, and upside down. In many cases, two methods are combined. It’s completely nutty and delightful.

One early favoured way of writing was easy for the eye and the finger to follow. The lines I had before me that morning were a perfect example. Translated exactly, they went:

CEBEREHMAI AUSEOFPSOASOF NOSAEDIM OFNOBODY

And with the words separated (a practice adopted much later):

CEB EREH MA I AUSE OF PSOAS OF NOS AEDIM OF NOBODY

This way of writing is called boustrophedon, one of the loveliest words in the English language, from the Greek for “turning like the ox when ploughing,” that is, with the text, including the spelling, alternating directions, in this case the first line reading from right to left, the second from left to right, and so on. With boustrophedon, as the eye reaches the end of a line, one can practically hear the clack of the bell and sense the wide blue sky above as the ox comes to the edge of the field and turns to start another furrow, the page an acre of arable land being worked.

I remember when you were learning how to read at school, Helen, you said you felt you were being pushed out of an airplane at the end of every line. You had difficulty landing the parachute of your understanding where it was supposed to, in that tiny field clear across the page. You often landed in another field. In frustration, you rebelled against the diktats of your teacher, and you became very good at it. Whether you were reading a sentence aloud in reverse or turning like the ploughing ox when writing, your nascent literacy made for disjointed narratives that were breathless, freewheeling, and weirdly satisfying. I loved them.

Mrs. Adamson, your grade two teacher, did not. Enough is enough, she decided. This has got to stop. But when a daughter comes home for the second time with a test in which 0/10 is circled in bright red ink and she’s in tears, a father has to step up. I marched into Mrs. Adamson’s classroom after school one day, an academic tome in my hands.

“She’s gone boustrophedon,” I explained to her. I showed her photographs of examples from Ancient Greece. “It’s the natural way to read and write. Are there line breaks in our minds? No, there are only sinuous furrows of thoughts. As we farm, so we should read and write. The way we do it now, the sentences all chopped up, it’s so wrong—why did we ever change?”

Mrs. Adamson, thirty years on the job, looked at me steadily and replied, “I don’t know, Mr. Donne. Maybe because we’re not in Ancient Greece anymore? Helen can’t keep writing like that, zigzagging to and fro down the page. Do you imagine her filling out a job application like that? She won’t get the job!”

“Let’s not worry about her job prospects just yet. She’s seven. She’ll get there. It took the Greeks over 300 years, into the fifth century before Christ, before they agreed on the direction in which they would write. Sadly, they put the ox out to pasture.”

Mrs. Adamson rolled her eyes.

Set in the current fashion, the sentence on the ostraka read like this (and come on, let’s be honest, doesn’t it look like a sentence that’s been cut into strips by some syntactical butcher? Where’s that dancing sway of the head you get with boustrophedon?):

I AM HERE BEC AUSE OF PSOAS OF MIDEA SON OF NOBODY

I wrote the sentence in the notebook I always carry with me, reading it aloud, voicing it one syllable at a time. Psoas? It was a man’s name, four Greek letters in the nominative, psi, omicron, alpha, and sigma, ps-o-a-s, pronounced SO-az, the p silent, and a strange one. But all cultures have names that are common and others that are uncommon.

The curator reappeared. “Ah, you’ve made yourself at home.”

“I hope you don’t mind. See, rubber gloves. This is curious, no?” I said, stepping aside to show her the six ostraka I had laid on the table.

“They’re all curious,” she replied. She donned gloves, gingerly took hold of the largest ostrakon and brought it to a nearby computer. She typed in the accession number with which it was discreetly marked.

“This one and its five mates were unearthed at a sanctuary on Mount Hymettos, near Athens, dedicated to Zeus. Their date has been established with fair precision: circa 710 BCE. The writing says, ‘I am here because of Psoas of Midea son of nobody.’”

“That’s what I made out too. And you said Mount Hymettos?”

“Yes. Database says we have a second set of ostraka in storage from the same site but from a different hand that says roughly the same thing, finishing at the s—of ‘son,’ presumably—and with the word ‘here’ misspelled. And we have another set, five pieces this time, from a third hand, that also makes reference to Psoas. That one says, ‘Psoas fought on until he won his doom.’ His doom—dark stuff.”

“Who was Psoas?” I mused.

“Zeus only knows. Likely these ostraka were the work of students learning how to write, which would explain the wobbly letters and the mistakes. Their teacher was probably a scribe at the sanctuary.”

“A peculiar nickname, ‘son of nobody.’ That would sting in a patriarchal society. Odd to assign to students as practice for their writing a sentence with an insult in it.”

“They could be curse tablets—katadesmoi.”

“But it’s early for katadesmoi, no? And the wording isn’t quite right. If you want a god to hex someone you hate, you want that god’s attention. Almost always in a katadesmos, a god is invoked. Here there’s no mention of Zeus, or any other god, only a claim to presence, I am here, from a mere mortal. That’s strange.”

“Strange indeed—welcome to my world. And welcome to Oxford.”

I left the Ashmolean. As I returned on foot to Magdalen College, I reflected on a mild coincidence: I’d been to Mount Hymettos in my backpacking days, after my first stint at university, those rent-free years when I was poor, working at whatever jobs I could find to pay for a bed and some food, teaching English, cleaning dorm rooms and toilets, washing dishes, sometimes sleeping in parks or on beaches, yet wealthy, because I had the world.

The ancient sanctuary to Zeus lies just east of Athens, easily reached but rarely visited by tourists, who rather head to Cape Sounion, with its magnificent temple to Poseidon. But I made my way to the sanctuary. It was a place of dark green leaves and tumbledown marble, black-veined with age. I stayed there a number of hours, into the dusk, entirely alone, and that spell of peace cast by the remains of Ancient Greece took hold of me, the work of the softly radiant sun, the gentle wind, the occasional bleating of sheep, and the whispering spirits hiding in the temple ruins. Time slipped by without notice and my mind emptied of worries and troubles, all knots untied, all riddles resolved, replaced by quiet rapture.

Everything became clear to me at that moment, but without the desolation of purely cerebral understanding: life is a matter of radiance and simplicity, and the challenge of life is to remain within that radiance and simplicity. I had a small clay jar of honey I’d bought at a roadside stand. In ancient times, Hymettos was famed for its thyme honey. It was as I ate that golden honey with white cheese on a slice of fresh bread in this sanctuary to Zeus that I fell in love with Ancient Greece and decided on a life of classical study. After a few too many years of peaceable drifting and random jobs, Hymettos was my Mount Ararat. I was a late but eager starter.

I wondered now if the strangely named Psoas had also eaten thyme honey on Mount Hymettos. Who was he? What was his story?

In time, I found—more: brought to life—Psoas of Midea. The son of nobody lay buried in ancient papyri and faded codices, even in broken cuneiform tablets, discovered hither and yon, the majority untranslated from their original language, his name often corrupted, as happens with unusual names, but he was there, he was there, with his story to tell.

But on the day I examined those six Ashmolean ostraka, picked up purely by chance, and all in all minor items in the extensive collections of the museum, there was still no Psoad (as I came to call the lost epic). There were only a few ancient student pottery scribblings. So this is not only a story—a Greek epic, to be exact—but the story of a story.

How to tell it, all of it, in the round? At first I thought I might speak about The Psoad in the third person, projecting my voice as from one of those outsize masks of Ancient Greek theatre, my authority loud and clear. That is the standard voice of academia, knowledgeable and slightly impersonal, something like this:

The voices of Athena, goddess of wisdom, and Apollo, god of truth. The third person presents the advantages of balance, perspective, sweep. It’s a cooler voice, an exercise of the mind.

But who am I kidding? The Greek mask kept slipping. The technical term for referring to oneself in the third person is illeism, and I—your grandfather a high school art teacher, your grandmother an office worker, your father the modest son of a family of average means—am no illeist. The personal narrator is rich in the possibilities of intimacy, proximity, warmth. It lends itself to a crestfallen face and a soft-spoken confession. An example:

I failed you as a father, Helen, and I failed your mother as a husband.

The voices of Aphrodite, goddess of love, and Ares, god of war.

I will speak in the pages that follow in my own voice, that I-voice that has always loved you, my darling Helen. All along, it’s just me. Just me. Your daddy.

Excerpted from Son of Nobody by Yann Martel. Copyright © 2026 Yann Martel. Published by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.

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I’m Brett, a contributing writer with The Walrus. This winter, I reported from Nuuk, Greenland, the quiet capital transformed by the threat of an American invasion into an unlikely stage for a global showdown.

What struck me was how deeply the threats had unsettled residents. People were on edge. But I was also struck by their willingness to share their stories.

The Walrus knows you need to hear from people who live in these places, and from reporters who are actually there. When you support The Walrus, you’re supporting real journalism.

The Walrus is investing in on-the-ground reporting while other newsrooms are getting slashed by corporate owners. We need your help to send writers where they should be.

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