“Life of Pi” author Yann Martel again flexes his extraordinary imagination in this latest novel. A Canadian classicist, stalled on his dissertation about Homer’s “Iliad,” leaves his wife and young daughter (named Helen, of course) for a yearlong fellowship at Oxford. The scholar, Harlow Donne, becomes obsessed by fragments of Greek text on scraps of shredded parchment, which he patches together to create an inventive account of the Trojan War from the perspective not of gods or nobility but of commoners, including a “son of nobody” named Psoas. The pages of Martel’s novel are split horizontally. There’s the so-called lost epic, which Harlow dubs “The Psoad,” on the upper half, and his highly personal commentary below, which links the horror and insensibility of war with the tragic loss of his marriage and young daughter. “Son of Nobody” joins other brilliant novels involving deranged scholars, including Vladimir Nabokov’s “Pale Fire.” – Heller McAlpin