The Cousins tells one of the great stories of the world, set in northwestern India some 3,000 years ago. This is a world in which fisher girls become queens, kingdoms are staked in dicing matches, and military high-tech is the horse-drawn chariot -- an exotic world certainly but a very human one once you're in it. The book is a fictional re-imagining of the central story of the Indian epic Mahabharata. Despite the word "epic," the Mahabharata is actually a vast collection of stories and sermons and learned expositions, with the central story constituting only a small part. But this small part IS an epic tale, of a family feud in a royal house that eventually leads to war -- the 18-day war of the 18 armies. This is quite unlike the many re-tellings of the Mahabharata in print. First, because it's fiction and, second, because it's a story of people and politics, with no digressions into the theological or the supernatural. But although The Cousins is fiction, it is a reliable rendering of the basic story. The characters in it are the central characters in the original; the events in it are the principal events in the original; and the order in which they appear is the order in which they happen in the original.