Yann Martel will read from his new novel Son of Nobody, followed by an on-stage conversation led by Houston author and former Houston Chronicle Book Editor Maggie Galehouse. The evening will conclude with a book sale and signing. The event is presented as part of the 2025/2026 Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series.
Yann Martel is the celebrated Canadian author of Life of Pi, a Booker Prize winning international bestseller made into an Academy Award winning film and successful Broadway play. Born in Salamanca, Spain, Martel grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Victoria, British Columbia, and, through his parents’ time in the Canadian Foreign Service, was also raised in Costa Rica, Paris, Madrid, and Mexico City. After studying philosophy in college, he worked at odd jobs—tree-planter, dishwasher, security guard—while establishing himself as a writer. Known for exploring themes of interpretation, identity, and storytelling, Martel is also the author of the novels Self, Beatrice & Virgil, and The High Mountains of Portugal, as well as the acclaimed short story collection The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.
In Houston, Martel will share his new novel Son of Nobody, described as a brilliant retelling of the Trojan War from the perspectives of an ancient soldier and a modern scholar. Praised by Booklist in a starred review as “original, thought-provoking, and utterly absorbing,” the novel reimagines classical antiquity via a new legend composed by Martel: 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. The poem is lost, until a Canadian academic, who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers it thirty centuries later—leading him to grapple with questions of ambition, family, and responsibility. Told through the scholar’s translation of this imagined ancient epic and his modern footnotes, Son of Nobody is “a powerful meditation on life, death, and the vanity of human wishes, all illustrated by a poem that would do Homer proud” (Kirkus starred review).
Maggie Galehouse is an award-winning local writer, editor, and researcher. She was the former book editor at the Houston Chronicle, and she has reported on education, crime, and business for a variety of newspapers. She currently works as a Program Director in the Communications Department at MD Anderson Cancer Center.
