Yann Martel will read from his new novel Son of Nobody, followed by an on-stage conversation led by acclaimed ABC-13 News journalist Melanie Lawson. 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. Life of Pi is, according to the Los Angeles Times Review of Books, “a story to make you believe in the soul-sustaining power of fiction and its human creators, and in the original power of storytellers like Martel.” Ursula K. LeGuin writes of his novel The High Mountains of Portugal, “We’re fortunate to have brilliant writers using their fiction to meditate on a paradox we need urgently to consider—the unbridgeable gap and the unbreakable bond between human and animal, our impossible self-alienation from our world.'”
Known for exploring themes of interpretation, identity, and storytelling, Martel comes to Houston to share his new novel Son of Nobody, which reimagines classical antiquity from an outsider’s perspective 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 of his life is lost—until a Canadian academic studying at Oxford discovers it thirty centuries later, which leads him to grapple with questions of ambition, family, and responsibility in both the ancient and modern worlds. Son of Nobody upends the steadfast traditional epic and shows, according to Martel, “that the past is never finished, that always there are parallels and returns and repetitions, always the song continues.”
ABC-13 News journalist Melanie Lawson has won numerous awards for her reporting, including three Emmys. She is well-known for her in-depth interviews with a wide range of notables, including three U.S. Presidents, Henry Kissinger, the Dalai Lama, Maya Angelou, Destiny’s Child, Spike Lee, and Denzel Washington. For the Inprint Margarett Root Brown Reading Series she has conducted several thoughtful interviews with Brit Bennett, Ta-Nehisi Coates, James McBride, Leila Mottley, and Annette Gordon-Reed.