Richard Adams captivated the world with his first book, The Hill Dwellers. This novel, initially rejected by all major publishing houses, fell in love with millions of readers around the world, was filmed twice and took its rightful place alongside “The Little Prince” by A. Saint-Exupéry, “The Seagull Named Jonathan Livingston” by R. Bach, “Wine of Dandelions" by R. Bradbury and "Flowers for Algernon" by D. Keyes. "Dwellers in the Hills" was followed by "Shardik" - a novel of truly epic proportions, and Adams himself called this book the most beloved in all his work. The world depicted in Shardik has been compared to J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth and C. S. Lewis's Narnia and even Homer's Odyssey. What unfolded before us was not just a panorama of a fictional world, thought out to the smallest detail, with living and breathing heroes, but a story about a man’s search for God, about faith and redemption. And Adams followed up Shardik with Maya, a novel set in the same Beklan Empire, but about a decade earlier. So, fifteen-year-old Maya is sold into slavery; from a fishing village she finds herself in the imperial capital, with its majestic palaces, innumerable temptations and dangerous, puzzling intrigues... For the first time in Russian!