08/07/2026
Looking for your next favorite read? Emily has a last minute recommendation for you!
"Son of Nobody" is a masterfully written book. Three books in one; an Ancient Greek epic, a book translating that Greek epic, and a book about a fictional man translating that Greek epic. Read this if you ever found yourself wishing to be an archaeologist in Ancient Greece, or are a superfan of The Odyssey long before Christopher Nolan got his hands on it.
BLURB:
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 thirty 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.
Son of Nobody takes readers from the plains of Troy to the halls of Oxford, from the classical to the contemporary, from ancient verses to modern footnotes. It is a dazzling, masterful feat of myth, history, and domesticity that explores how stories become facts, the price we pay to share them, and how we live—then, now, always.
