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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

This week I'm very pleased to be joined by our guest, Jan Martel,

who many of you remember is the prize-winning novelist of Life of Pie,

whose new book has been a decade in the making.

It's Son of Nobody. Jan, welcome.

Now, Son of Nobody is quite an unusual book, isn't it? It tells one story in the footnotes and one story in the body of the text, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I wanted to, I mean, at heart it's the story of the discovery of a lost Trojan war tradition.

A Canadian scholar discovers this lost Trojan war traditions.

There were many, many stories told of the Trojan War.

We all know of the Trojan Horse, which in fact is not mentioned in the Iliad.

But there are other ones that were lost over time.

And so in this novel, I posit the discovery of a lost Trojan War tradition.

And the conventional way of telling that story would have been to have, you know,

discursive prose on the page with quotes of this lost tradition,

these extended flashbacks to the past, to the Trojan War.

But I didn't like that idea because it would root the story in the present and the past

...