The Psoad is an Ancient Greek epic in free verse that follows a goatherd’s son, Psoas of Midea, who leaves his wife and family to fight with the Greeks at Troy. This commoner’s story was lost to time --- until Harlow Donne, a Canadian academic who has left his own wife and daughter behind to study at Oxford, discovers its relics nearly 30 centuries later. As sole translator and interpreter of The Psoad, Harlow dedicates the poem and its footnotes to his daughter, Helen. Under his gaze, a personal message to his beloved child appears in the ancient text, like a palimpsest. Despite the thousands of years and hundreds of miles that separate Psoas and Harlow, a thread hasn’t frayed: the universal song of homesickness and regret, of love, ambition and grief.

A young man experiences tremendous loss, and in his grief takes off on an adventure to rediscover an ancient artifact he believes will change the way we view the world. Years later, a pathologist with a fond love of mystery novels experiences a very strange mystery of his own. Fifty years after all these events have been set in motion, a senator finds that by rescuing a chimpanzee from a research facility, he reacquaints himself with a freedom he forgot he could experience. These three very different stories are all held together by the strings of love and loss.

After the sinking of a cargo ship, a solitary lifeboat remains bobbing on the wild blue Pacific. The only survivors from the wreck are a 16-year-old boy named Pi, a hyena, a wounded zebra, an orangutan --- and a 450-pound Royal Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi Patel, whose fear, knowledge and cunning allow him to coexist with the tiger, Richard Parker, for 227 days in an unbelievable survival story while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional. But is it more true?