Yann Martel will release his first novel in a decade next year, People magazine reports.
W.W. Norton will publish the Canadian author’s Son of Nobody in the winter. The press calls the book a “breathtaking feat of the imagination.”
Martel made his literary debut in 1993 with The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios, which was reissued in 2004. He followed that up in 2006 with the novel Self.
In 2001, he published Life of Pi, about a young Indian boy stranded on a lifeboat with a menagerie of animals, including a Bengal tiger and an orangutan. The book was a publishing phenomenon; it won the Booker Prize and was adapted into a 2012 film directed by Ang Lee and starring Suraj Sharma, Tabu, and Gérard Depardieu.
Martel has since published two other novels, Beatrice and Virgil and The High Mountains of Portugal.
Son of Nobody is a retelling of the story of the Trojan War. It follows Psoas of Midea, the son of a goatherd who fights in the war, and Harlow Donne, a modern-day Canadian academic who discovers an epic poem about the man. “Son of Nobody upends the regal perspective of traditional epics and shows that ‘the past is never done with, that always there are parallels and returns and repetitions, always the song continues,’” Norton says.
“My inspiration was Homer’s Iliad, which remains an utterly modern work,” Martel told People. “It’s a mixture of Waiting for Godot and All Quiet on the Western Front. It set my imagination on fire and the result is Son of Nobody.”
Son of Nobody is slated for publication on March 31, 2026.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
