
“Tell me about a complicated man.”
Homer, The Odyssey (trans. Emily Wilson)
About the Book
Omar Reyes built the tools that dismantled the Trojan Grid — a surveillance network that monitored 800 million people across fourteen countries. When the operation succeeded, he was supposed to come home. Instead, he disappeared.
His wife Penny is told he’s dead. She doesn’t believe it. For eight years she fights a quiet war against the men circling her husband’s company — weaving legal complexity the way Homer’s Penelope wove her shroud, buying time she can’t justify and refuses to surrender.
Their son Tel, nineteen and fierce, traces a single cryptocurrency transaction to an unnamed island in the Indian Ocean. He searches for his father across three continents, from Nairobi to the Seychelles, driven by a conviction that everyone else calls grief.
And Omar — trapped on a billionaire’s private island, kept by a woman who calls it love — has spent seven years building an escape. His codename was NOBODY. And Nobody is coming home.
A modern retelling of Homer’s Odyssey set in the age of algorithmic control, Nobody braids three journeys into a propulsive literary thriller about surveillance, freedom, and what it costs to find your way back to the people you love.
From the Pages
“Tell me, O Algorithm, of that resourceful man who wandered far and wide after he destroyed the network that had enslaved half a continent.”
— Opening line
“You can love someone and also be angry that they left. You can wait for someone and also think they're an idiot for going.”
— Destiny, age fifteen
“I don't need you to be necessary. I need you to be chosen. Do you understand the difference?”
— Penny to Omar
Structure
Part One: Three Threads
12 chapters
Brooklyn. The island. Nairobi. Three timelines converge.
Part Two: The Gauntlet
12 chapters
Istanbul. The Bosphorus. Warsaw. The Atlantic. Every border a battle.
Part Three: Homecoming
9 chapters
The boardroom. The trial. The test. Coming home is harder than leaving.
Part Four: Coda
2 chapters
Twenty years later. A blue door. A granddaughter's question.
35 chapters • ~60,000 words • ~240 pages
Homer’s Story. Our Time.
The Odyssey endures because its central question endures: what are you willing to sacrifice to get back to the people you love? In our time, the monsters are digital. Calypso is a tech billionaire. The Lotus Eaters wear AR glasses. The Cyclops has one camera eye that sees everything. But the journey is the same. And the blue door is still waiting.
Penelope
Penny
Calypso
Kallie
Polyphemus
Poly
Telemachus
Tel
Circe
Dr. Kirke
Aeolus
Boran
The Lotus
Elysium
Nobody
Omar
For readers of
About the author
Peter Burchardt is the author of Designed to Feel, The Happiness Blueprint, Override, Hooked by Design, and The Tribe Manager— books on human nature, evolution, and how to live well as the animal you actually are. Nobody is his first novel. He is based in Dubai, UAE.
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