Maia
core novel 1984 The Beklan Empire
Record
| First published | 1984 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.02 (2,528 ratings, collected 2026-10-07) |
| Page count | 1056 |
| First-edition ISBN | 9780670800339 |
Synopsis
Maia is a fifteen-year-old peasant beauty from a village on Lake Serrelind, sold into slavery by her stepfather's jealous wife and carried to Bekla, the empire's capital, in the company of the Suban girl Occula, who becomes her friend and protector. In the city the two are bought into the household of the High Counsellor Sencho, a glutton who uses his slave girls as spies as well as concubines, and Maia's beauty and Occula's cunning draw them into the intrigues of the Leopards, the ruling faction, and of the rebellion gathering against them. A swim across a river under fire makes Maia a public heroine; love for a man of the enemy's side makes her a traitor in some eyes. Set about a dozen years before Shardik, the novel is an immense picaresque of slavery, politics, sex and war in the same invented empire.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Beklan Empire
- Series: not part of a registered series (standalone work within its universe)
- Author: Richard Adams
Notes
- Viking, 1984; a loose prequel set in the Beklan Empire about a dozen years before Shardik, sharing several minor characters but no plot. Contains explicit erotic content; adult.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings and are never conflated: a book's place in one says nothing about its place in the other.
- Publication order, within The Beklan Empire (standalone work): position 2 of 2: previous Shardik (1974)
Sources
← The Beklan Empire dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.