Yann Martel — Son of Nobody
The Life of Pi author reimagines the Trojan War through two ordinary soldiers, exploring myth, mortality, and what history forgets about the people it uses.
Why we picked this
Martel returns with a retelling of the Trojan War that ignores the heroes and follows the expendable — a structural argument dressed as a novel, from a writer who earns his conceits.
Yann Martel is best known for Life of Pi, a novel that smuggled a philosophical argument about storytelling and belief inside an adventure narrative. Son of Nobody deploys a similar strategy: it takes one of Western civilization’s founding myths and asks what happens if you follow the people history named no one.
The book centers on two ordinary soldiers — neither Achilles nor Odysseus — navigating the siege of Troy. From that vantage point, Martel examines what the epic tradition requires us to forget: the mass of people whose deaths make heroism legible. It’s a literary move with clear contemporary resonance, and Martel has the craft to pull it off without turning it into a lecture.
The event at Politics and Prose offers a chance to hear Martel in conversation about the mechanics of the retelling — how he inhabited voices that have no historical record, and what it means to write myth from the ground up.