When I was a doctoral candidate at Oxford, I spent much of my time working in the papyrology rooms. Usually, my only company was the curator, a kind and learned Sardinian woman who is now a professor at the University of Milan.

One day, the news was that a famous novelist was coming to visit the Oxyrhynchus Papyri collection. “Have you heard of him?” the curator asked.

I had, but I’d never read his work.

“He has asked to be given a tour of the collection.”

The name of the famous novelist was Yann Martel, author of the Booker Prize winning novel Life of Pi. He said that he was researching a new book, in which Oxford’s papyrus collection would feature prominently.

Review: Son of Nobody – Yann Martel (Text Publishing)

Several years after Martel’s visit to Oxford, that book has now appeared. Son of Nobody is about a Canadian scholar named Harlow Donne who wins a one-year fellowship to go to Oxford to work on papyri with the eminent scholar Franklin Cubitt.

To take up the “unbelievable opportunity” of the fellowship, Harlow has to leave behind his wife and daughter in Canada. The relationship is already, as he says, “on the rocks”. The news about the fellowship sets off a full couple’s argument:

And so it started, as it always did, with the appearance of a single pinpoint of resentment that called forth another pinpoint, then another and another, tit for tat, until, out of nothing, in the evening quiet of a bedroom, shimmered the complete outline of a domestic dispute, a bright constellation of infinite acrimony.

And so it started, as it........

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