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What was once known as India now consists of several political entities, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan. The larger area is generally called South Asia or the Indian subcontinent. The writers who are classified as South Asian, however, may not have been born on the subcontinent or may have moved elsewhere. In a few cases, their connection to the continent is not by blood but through marriage to a South Asian.

Before Asian Indians could write poetry in English, two related conditions were necessary. First, the English language had to be sufficiently Indianized to be able to express the reality of the Indian situation; second, Indians had to be sufficiently Anglicized to use the English language to express themselves. The first of these two conditions, the Indianization of the English language, began much before the second, the Anglicization of Indians. Hence, though the first Indian poet to write in English was Henry Derozio, in the early nineteenth century, the Indianization of English had begun about three centuries earlier, in 1498, when Vasco da Gama, sailing from Lisbon, landed in Kerala. It was almost another century before the first Englishman came to India, but by the time Father Thomas Stephens arrived in Goa in 1579, a considerable body of Indo-Portuguese words were already being assimilated into English. Such lexical borrowing accelerated with the increasing British presence in India after 1599 when the East India Company was launched. For nearly 150 years after the charter of the East India Company, Englishmen in India wrote only travel books for the public and journals and letters in private. Nevertheless, by the end of the seventeenth century, a number of Indian words had been naturalized into English. The following is a selection from G. Subba Rao’s catalog in his book Indian Words in English (1969):

Tibetans refer to their country as the “Land of Snows,” and this name accurately conveys the remoteness, mystery, and beauty of the land that contains the world’s highest mountain, Everest (or “Goddess Mother of the Snows” in Tibetan). Even in the twenty-first century, Tibet remains geographically and politically isolated. Tibet, an autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China, covers an area of approximately 500,000 square miles. By contrast, historical Tibet—the region over which the cultural, religious, and frequently political influence of Tibet extended—encompassed roughly double that area and included all the highland plateaus between the Himalayan mountain range in the south and the Altyn Tagh and Kunlun ranges in the north.

Like the Slovenes, the Macedonians have had to travel a rocky historical path. After their early state was subjugated in the eleventh century by the Byzantines and, later, by the Turks, they did not enjoy independence until 1945. During those long centuries, however, they maintained their ethnic and cultural identity. When conditions became favorable at the end of World War II, they began to produce their own literature.

Long before the vast region that is now Canada was explored and settled by Europeans, it was home to a number of Indigenous peoples. Each group had its own culture and language, but the groups were similar in some ways. Like Indigenous Tribes in other parts of the world, they had stories about the creation of the world and humanity, their natural surroundings, and animals that behaved like humans and, in some cases, actually became humans. One of the common elements in these stories was the inclusion of a trickster figure, whose function was to add suspense and humor to narratives.

From its earliest beginnings in the eighteenth century, Caribbean, or West Indian, poetry has been an elusive but dynamic art. Though sometimes static, it has always been an evolving art form. According to one scholar, Lloyd W. Brown, the first 180 years of West Indian poetry were uneven at best; however, Brown was appraising only the formal aspect of Caribbean poetry, a poetic tradition that was imposed on the peoples of the West Indies first by a slavocracy and later by an imperialist regime. There has always been an oral tradition in the Caribbean, and although this tradition has been suppressed, it could never be destroyed. It has existed in children’s ring games, in calypso, and in the combined arts of carnival, Junkanoo, and other folk and religious celebrations. Then, too, the unwritten tradition of the Amerindians has enriched the art of Caribbean poetry. Ironically, after years of suppression, the folk and oral traditions, combined with other aspects of Afro-Caribbean cultural experiences, are theorized, by Edward Kamau Brathwaite, as the wellspring of “nation language.”

The Spanish words and achieved currency in Spain shortly after 1600. Today they are terms in literary criticism, sometimes misused because of the vague meaning attached to them. The revival of the genre in the twentieth century was accompanied by an increased critical interest in this type of novel, with the result that some critics try to stretch the definition of the picaresque while others attempt to restrict it. Still, some features are generally accepted as distinct characteristics of the picaresque, including a loose, episodic structure; a rogue-hero (the picaro) who is on the move and goes through a series of encounters with representatives of a hostile and corrupt world; a first-person narrative; and a satirical approach to the society in which the adventures occur.

The Family Conspiracy is a realistic story of family life on a sheep station in the western part of New South Wales. The story begins with a crisis: Mrs. Ethel Barker becomes very ill in the middle of the night, and after examining her, the doctor informs her husband, Mr. Barker, that in addition to being overworked and exhausted, Mrs. Barker needs an operation. Obviously the story is set before the advent of national health insurance, for it is clear that the Barkers must find the money to pay for this surgery. Unfortunately, times are desperate. There is a serious drought, which imperils the Barkers’ economic future. Furthermore, the time has come for two of the children, Lorna Barker and Edward Barker, to move on from their mother’s instruction and go to boarding school. For years, Mrs. Barker has scrimped to save the money for their education; she flatly refuses to take any of those savings for an operation for herself.

Goodbye to the Purple Sage: The Last Great Ride of the Sheriff of Medicine Creek is a Western whose comic tone is produced by an original use of cliches in plot and character. The story is told by Sagebrush Sheridan the Third or Fourth (“Deppity”), who greatly admires the protagonist, Sagebrush Sheridan the First, Sheriff of Medicine Creek, even while he sees the difference between the sheriff’s illusions and reality. The novel begins in Medicine Creek, Texas. The sheriff is jubilant because he has captured the six-member Pecos Gang, his old enemies, and has even confiscated their boots. Unfortunately, when the sheriff is thrown by his horse, the Pecos Gang escapes, and, though bootless, they ride toward Mexico.

Alfred Coleman, a middle-aged professor of the classics. The son of a minister, Alfred has inherited his father's sense of duty, if not his faith. Except for his wife, Mary, who died after ten years of marriage, Alfred has never permitted himself to become close to anyone. Although he is secretly troubled by the memory of his own wartime weakness, he projects an image of certainty, insisting that everyone accept his values, which are chiefly the suppression of emotion and dedication to learning, particularly to the classics. It is his inflexibility that drives his son, Jeremy Coleman, from home and causes a seventeen-year break in their relationship. Finally, while visiting his son in a hospital, Alfred admits his own vulnerability, enabling father and son to be reconciled.

Sarah Phillips, the protagonist and narrator, a pretty twenty-one-year-old black woman, who grew up in an affluent Philadelphia suburb. She went to a private school and to Harvard University, and now, after her graduation, has gone to live in Paris. When she realizes that she cannot break off with her family or her heritage, Sarah thinks back over the past in an attempt to find her own identity before her inevitable return home.

Shigekuni Honda, the protagonist, a young Japanese man who is studying to become a lawyer. A natural leader, he is exceptionally mature, sometimes appearing to be almost pompous. He is already committed to governing his life by the rule of reason instead of being controlled by his emotions. When he is at the deathbed of his friend Kiyoaki Matsugae, he realizes somewhat regretfully that he can never give himself fully to any passion.

Snap’s house. London residence of Mr. Snap the younger, a bailiff. He uses part of his home as a sponging-house, where debtors are imprisoned until they are either bailed out or transported to jail. Since the debtors mix freely with the Snaps and their guests, the house becomes young Jonathan Wild’s college of crime, with a resident tutor, the card sharp and confidence man, Count la Ruse, who has to stay with Snap until he can satisfy his creditors. The house is also significant because it is there that Wild meets Snap’s daughter Laetitia, who convinces him that she is chaste, when in fact it is only Wild whom she will not admit to her bed. This bit of bad luck at Snap’s house indicates that like every other “great” man, Wild has his weaknesses. In the end, it is his arrogance that brings him down.

Den. Place where the narrator lies down and begins to dream the story of Christian at the beginning of part 1. Bunyan was undoubtedly remembering the jail on Bedford Bridge where he was confined for preaching illegally, thus putting his religious convictions ahead of his family responsibilities, just as Christian does when he leaves his wife and children behind.

Although she was thirty-eight when the first volume of her first epic novel appeared, from the time of her birth Sigrid Undset had been accumulating the knowledge and the experience that would enable her to write the books for which her Nobel Prize was awarded. Undset was born in Denmark, but her family moved to her father’s native Norway when she was two. During her childhood, Undset learned Scandinavian folktales from her mother. However, she said later that it was the influence of her father, Ingvald Undset, and his archaeological work that dominated her imagination. At the museum of antiquities, Undset was allowed to handle medieval artifacts, and she made up stories to go with the objects. She might well have become an archaeologist, as her father hoped she would, had his relatives in Trondheim not turned her attention to the saga. Her best-known works would be her prose sagas, which were set in Norway during the Middle Ages.

Wakefield. English town in which the vicar, Dr. Primrose, settles after losing his fortune. Its locale is never named, but to Primrose it is more than a place where there is a cure available and a farm that he can manage—it is a refuge, where he can keep his family safe from the world.

On Christian Theology is one of many works by Rowan Williams, whose erudition, superb style, and profound vision earned him a reputation as one of the finest theologians of his era. Born in Wales, Williams earned two degrees at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and a D. Phil. from Christ Church and Wadham College, Oxford. After being ordained a priest of the Church of England, he remained in the academic world for the next decade and a half, becoming a recognized poet and a prominent theologian as well as a social activist. In 1991, Williams was elected bishop of Monmouth, Newport, Wales. Nine years later, he became archbishop of Wales, and in 2003, he was enthroned as archbishop of Canterbury. However, his administrative duties did not prevent Williams from continuing to pursue his scholarly interests and to publish works on a wide variety of subjects.

After two decades of efforts throughout Australia by women’s groups such as the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, in 1894 South Australia became the first state to enfranchise women. In 1899, Western Australia became the second, although it excluded Aboriginals of either sex (unlike South Australia). By 1908, white women in all the Australian states were able to vote. This change was effected only because the male population had been convinced that women could make valuable contributions to the issues that most directly affected them: The suffragettes had argued that women’s roles as wives and mothers gave them special insights into the needs of women and children. However, Australian women were not expected to become legislators, lawyers, or justices of the peace, much less high-ranking state officials. Ironically, those opportunities were made available to them in large part because of the efforts of Edith Dircksey Cowan, the first woman elected to a state parliament in Australia.

At his home in Lublin, Yasha Mazur, a magician, gets out of bed and eats the breakfast that his wife, Esther, prepared. Again, he assures her that he has never been unfaithful, even on long trips such as that from which he had just returned. However, while he sits in a tavern drinking beer and discussing women, his thoughts turn to the woman with whom he is presently in love, Emilia Chrabotzky, who wants him to convert to Catholicism, marry her, and move to Italy. Yasha cannot get Emilia out of his mind, but he is reluctant to leave his childless wife, who has made Yasha the center of her life. Moreover, though, unlike his wife, he is careless in religious matters, Yasha is hesitant about rejecting his faith and his people.

The Oxford prize for history brings Professor Godfrey St. Peter not only a certain international reputation but also the sum of five thousand pounds. The five thousand pounds, in turn, helps the St. Peter family build a new house, into which the professor is frankly reluctant to move.

Gitanjali Song Offerings is a collection of 103 prose poems, selected by Tagore from among his Bengali poems and translated by him into English. The collection brought Tagore international attention and won him the Nobel Prize in Literature. Although Tagore later published more than twenty additional volumes of his poetry in English translation, Gitanjali Song Offerings remained one of his most beloved works.

Jonathan Wild has been prepared by nature to be a “great man.” His ancestors were all men of greatness, many of them hanged for thievery or treason. Those who escaped were simply shrewder and more fortunate than the others. Jonathan, however, is to be so “great” as to put his forefathers to shame.

On a Sunday evening in April, Jimmy Porter and Cliff Lewis, both working-class men, and Jimmy’s upper-class wife, Alison, are in the attic flat they share. Music is playing on the radio, and while Alison irons, Jimmy and Cliff read the newspapers. From time to time, Jimmy makes acid comments on what he is reading, orders the other two to minister to his needs, or points out Cliff’s defects, in particular his ignorance and his ineffectuality. Jimmy’s worst venom is reserved for his wife, who he says is as vacuous as her mother and father and, like them, incapable of thought. Cliff defends Alison, and she treats him with sisterly affection, pressing his trousers and giving him cigarettes, despite the fact that the doctor and Jimmy have forbidden him to smoke. Furious because Cliff and Alison refuse to fight with him, Jimmy contrasts their lethargy with the energy of his former mistress, Madeline, and of Webster, a gay friend of Alison. He then returns to his verbal attacks on Alison, her family, and her gender, claiming that women’s worst vice is that they are noisy. Increasingly annoyed with both Alison and Cliff, Jimmy turns off the radio, contending that with Alison ironing and Cliff turning the pages of his newspaper, it is impossible to hear the music.

The Girls of Slender Means illustrates Spark’s belief that what may seem like trivialities are actually important events on the path to salvation or damnation. Certainly, in 1945 there is not much serious conversation at the May of Teck Club, a hostel in bombed-out London where some forty girls, mostly students and office workers of good background, can be appropriately housed. Spark can easily summarize the subjects of discourse at the club as being love and money, the latter needed to buy clothes and cosmetics in aid of the former. Except for a few such as Jane Wright, who has ambitions in the publishing business, and Joanna Childe, who, after one failed love affair, has decided to devote her life to poetry, the girls’ major amusements are gossip and flirtation. The greatest success at the latter is the beautiful, self-centered Selina Redwood, who collects men of all sorts, including Nicholas Farringdon, an irresolute young man, most recently the author of a book in favor of atheism.

The Peacock Spring is a poignant story of love and loss set in postcolonial India, where a rigid social system has not been markedly altered by political independence. In selecting their associates, both Indians and British residents are still very much aware of class and, when it comes to marriage, of ethnicity as well. If even so powerful a person as Sir Edward Gwithiam meets with resistance when he crosses the established lines, it is obvious that two young lovers, still financially dependent, cannot hope to marry, no matter how sincere their feelings for each other. Rumer Godden’s novel is of special interest to young Western readers because it shows them what life can be like in an exotic world very different from their own and at the same time emphasizes the fact that, wherever they live, young adults have the same problems with teachers, parents, and their own emotions.

As the title suggests, Family Matters is a story about relationships. The central character in the book is Nariman Vakeel, an elderly Parsi widower. Nariman lives in a spacious flat in an apartment building in Bombay, along with his unmarried stepddaughter, Coomy Contractor, and his stepson Jal Contractor, who is also single. Nariman is a retired English professor, a kindly man whose students remember him with affection. However, because they blame him for their mother’s tragic death, Nariman’s stepchildren loathe him so much that even though he adopted them legally, they refuse to use his name, though they are perfectly willing to share his home.

Gustad Noble, the protagonist of Such a Long Journey, is a well-meaning man with a highly developed sense of duty. Lesser men might well have become embittered by the losses that his family has incurred. Noble’s grandfather had a thriving furniture business; his father, a successful bookstore. Mismanagement by Noble’s dissolute uncle resulted in bankruptcy and the loss of everything the family had accumulated over the years. Though Noble sometimes recalls those earlier days of relative luxury, he tries to make the best of his modest circumstances.

On a beautiful September morning, Fred Ferguson gets up early and strolls around his yard. Although he is proud of his comfortable home and his position in the small town of Belmond, Iowa, where he lives, Fred feels burdened by his responsibilities. So many people seem to depend on Fred: his family, his coworkers at the bank, his fellow Presbyterians, in fact, the whole community. When Fred’s wife, Annie, gets up, she thinks briefly about her dead parents and the inevitability of change. Then she begins her day’s work. At breakfast, their daughter Margaret is generally nasty, causing Annie to wonder why this middle child is so different. As usual, Fred is obtuse; as usual, Annie tries to please him. After everyone leaves, she broods about how tired she is of pretending and how much she resents having to placate Fred’s hypercritical mother and sister.

The Maid of the North is a collection of twenty-one folktales from throughout the world. Ethel Johnston Phelps calls them “feminist” stories because they show women as strong not weak, active not passive.

Phaedria, a young Athenian of good family, is disturbed because he was excluded from the house of Thais, a courtesan. He is also perturbed because of the love he feels for the woman. Phaedria’s slave, anxious to help his master, advises that Phaedria retire to the country for a time and try to forget her. Parmeno, the slave, really believes the woman is wicked and that his master will be better off without her. As master and slave stand before Thais’s house, which is next to Phaedria’s father’s residence, the courtesan herself comes out to explain why she refuses to admit the young man. She explains that Thraso, a warrior, purchased a slave who formerly belonged to her mother. Thais believes that the slave, a young woman, is actually a free citizen of Athens. In order to get a good name in Athens, to which city she recently came, Thais hopes to learn the woman’s identity and restore her to her family. Thais has to humor the captain in order to get possession of the slave.

Ursa Beatrice Mackenzie, the protagonist and narrator. The only child of a teacher from Connecticut and a prominent West Indian political leader, Ursa now lives in New York City after having spent her first fourteen years on the island of Triunion. Although she seems independent and successful, in fact everything about Ursa's life is uncertain, from her future as a free-lance researcher to her relationship with her long-time lover, Lowell Carruthers, whom she trusts so little that she has an abortion without even informing him of her pregnancy. It becomes evident that Ursa cannot proceed with her own life until she has sorted out her feelings about her parents and her native island.

Cherokee is a detective story patterned after New Wave films. Unlike most detective stories, it presents characters and events to the reader without explanation and often without connection. Confusedly, George Chave wanders through these events, pursuing his ideal girl and haphazardly accomplishing his assignments while other characters pursue wealth, one another, and George. Only in the superb climactic scene of the novel, when one group of characters after another appears, do their relationships and the plot itself become clear. The ultimate detective, then, is the reader, who must watch the characters and the plot elements as Jean Echenoz masterfully juggles them, working toward a conclusion which the writer alone has in mind.

Dr. Edward Sanders, the assistant director of a leper hospital. A gray-haired, unkempt man of forty, he has spent fifteen years in Africa, ten at the leper hospital. Uneasy because of a mysterious letter from his former mistress, Suzanne Clair, Sanders goes to Mont Royal to check on her. There, he risks death from violent men as well as from a rapidly spreading plague that crystallizes all living things. Although he escapes with the help of a jeweled cross, he eventually returns to the crystal forest, where he had for the first time felt whole.

Bailey, as the owner of Bailey's Café is called, a black veteran of World War II whose two great loves are baseball and his wife, Nadine. After the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Bailey was overcome by guilt and despair. He was rescued by Nadine, who installed him in the café, where he can talk to the customers and speculate about life.

Dougal Douglas, a new employee of the English textile firm Meadows, Meade Grindley. A twenty-three-year-old Scot with a deformed shoulder, a captivating smile, and a complete disregard for convention, Dougal is hired in the vaguely defined position of “Arts man” by virtue of his M.A. from the University of Edinburgh. Later, under another name, he takes a similar position with a rival firm. Because he is able to play any role that occurs to him, Dougal can adjust himself to almost all the characters he meets, and as a result, he elicits their secrets, draws them into his whimsical plans, and complicates their lives. Finally, he leaves for Africa, later appearing in a monastery and eventually choosing a career as a writer.

George Chave (shahv), the protagonist. A tall, thin man in his thirties, he is looking for work as a way to please his girlfriend, Veronique, but he soon shifts his devotion to Jenny Weltman. Hired as a detective, he arouses the envy of other employees by finding a lost wife and a lost parrot. As unexplainable events take place around him, he is pursued by the police, hidden by friends, kidnapped, taken by a cult, and finally united with Jenny.

Lester Ballard, a twenty-seven-year-old farmer in Sevier County, Tennessee. After his mother runs away and his father kills himself, Lester is left alone, too brutal and mean to make friends. In later years, his only companion is his rifle, and his only interests are hunting, drinking, and sex. After he loses the family farm for nonpayment of taxes and is badly beaten when he objects, he resolves to avenge himself on the new owner, John Greer. In the meantime, he tries to make a home in a remote, deserted house. All the women he approaches reject him. For companionship, he has to depend on three stuffed animals he wins at a fair; for a sexual outlet, he watches couples in cars or fondles clothing stolen from women. Lester is so preoccupied with his own needs that he has no empathy for others. When one girl turns him down, Lester murders her and sets her house on fire, leaving her retarded child to burn to death beside the body of his mother. Finally, Lester takes as his lover a girl he has found dead in a car. After he loses her body in a fire, he begins killing the women he needs. Although couples and cars keep disappearing, for a long time Lester is not suspected of being involved. Ironically, it is not his sexual obsession but his insistence on getting revenge that leads to his downfall. He tries to kill John Greer but merely wounds him. He is shot, loses an arm, and ends up in a mental hospital, where he is again lonely, alienated from his fellow killers.

With A Day Late and a Dollar Short, Terry McMillan returned to a familiar format. Like Mama, the new novel is the story of a large African American family dominated by a matriarch. In fact, Viola Price’s extended family has so many members that, without the sketch of the family tree inside the cover of the hardback version of the book, it would be difficult for readers to follow the action. The novel is also confusing because there are six first-person narrators: Viola Price, her four children, and their father, Viola’s former husband, Cecil. However, this approach has the advantage of making the characters more vivid and also more sympathetic. Despite their flaws, they all mean well. Moreover, for all their squabbling, they do have feelings for one another. Unfortunately, none of the children will face the truth about themselves and their lives, and Viola knows that, until they do, they will never fulfill the potential that she sees in all of them.

These Thousand Hills traces the rise of Lat Evans from penniless cowboy to well-to-do rancher, civic leader, and political candidate. In order to attain the success that he craves, in order to reach a financial and social level which his pioneer father merely dreamed about, Evans must struggle with nature, with society, and with his own impulses.

There Is a Tree More Ancient than Eden is a novel which explores the consciousness of a number of characters. From the record of those explorations, one comes to understand not only the characters but also some of the events which shaped them. There is no traditional plot line which proceeds in an orderly fashion throughout the novel. There are, however, a number of incidents which were important enough to influence the characters.

Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush is the story of a black girl in her early teens who must deal with poverty, isolation, overhwhelming responsibility, disillusionment, and loss. That she survives and finally triumphs is the result of her own strength and, as she finally realizes, her mother’s never-failing love for her.

Bastard Out of Carolina is the story of a young South Carolina girl’s childhood, which, though blighted by illegitimacy, poverty, and her stepfather’s abuse, is made bearable by the love of her extended family and even by the love of the mother who seemed to have abandoned her.

Lavidia Cross, a black widow in rural Georgia, had little to leave her only daughter, Faith Cross, except a mysterious injunction: Faith must get herself a “Good Thing.” In Faith and the Good Thing, Faith Cross goes to Chicago, first to discover what this Good Thing is and then to acquire it.

Eva Luna is the story of a poor girl with a great gift for storytelling who, because of her indomitable spirit, manages to survive a perilous youth and become a successful television scriptwriter. The title character of the novel is also the narrator. Even when Eva herself could not have witnessed what she describes, the implication is that she is faithfully reporting what she has been told by those who were present and thus, in a sense, making those events a part of her own narrative. Since all the people mentioned affect Eva’s own history, these stories are an essential part of her life.

The Fragmented Life of Don Jacobo Lerner , which begins on the night before Don Jacobo’s death, recounts the major events of his twelve years as a Russian Jew in Peru through objective narratives and through what might be called the testimony of those with whom his life was involved. The novel traces the steps toward the loss of a sense of self in two major characters: Jacobo Lerner himself and his illegitimate son, Efraín.

"Trick or Treat" is a story of mutual seduction, told in the third-person through the minds of two characters. The action is what one would expect in an ordinary love story. It begins with the recognition of desire, proceeds through the uncertainties of courtship, and ends with the relationship about to be consummated. What makes the story unusual is that the two people involved are a respectable housewife and a twelve-year-old boy.

"The Third and Final Continent" is the story of how a young immigrant adjusts to his new home and new bride. The heroine of the work is an eccentric, elderly widow, who manages to help the young man feel less lonely. She shows him qualities in his wife that he had not noticed and provides him with a model for his future life.

By founding the Louisiana Colony in 1699, France supported its previous claim to the Mississippi Valley, which was also coveted by Spain and by England.

Positioned as it was at the western entrance of the Mediterranean, the Rock of Gibraltar was one of the major fortresses in Great Britain’s ever-increasing empire. Historically, however, the peninsula had been attached to Spain. It had been captured by the British in 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession, and ceded to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. The Spanish wanted Gibraltar back. Moreover, they agreed with the French in viewing Great Britain as the most dangerous threat to their colonial endeavors. Word of successes by the rebelling American colonists persuaded France and Spain in 1779 that the British were now vulnerable, and the two countries decided to join forces against Great Britain. After an abortive attempt to invade the British Isles, they turned their attention to Gibraltar. The only way to win it, they decided, was to starve its inhabitants into submission.

Mayo Cornelius (M. C.) Higgins, a black teenager. The eldest child in his family, M. C. has a strong sense of responsibility. He worries about the younger children, whom he supervises when his parents are at work; about his mother, whom he adores; and about his father, toward whom his feelings are ambivalent, combining respect and concern with anger. M. C. is athletic, a superb swimmer and a wrestler who will soon be able to defeat his father in their periodic tests of strength. He knows woodcraft and mountain lore. He also knows how to think for himself; despite his father's warnings, he has chosen a best friend from the feared Killburn clan.