The Story of the Pāndavas

The Mahabharata, one of the two great epics of India, is a long and complicated work which was enlarged through many centuries from the simple hero sagas on which it was based, to become a poem of some hundred thousand verses. Barbara Leonie Picard has brilliantly retold the principal events of the main theme of the epic: the rivalry between the two branches of the kuru royal family. A rivalry which grew into a hatred so strong that it brought about a disastrous war.


Barbara Leonie Picard was born in England in 1917 of mixed German-Venezuelan and French parentage. A long time resident of Lewes, Sussex, England, she died in 2011 at the age of 93. Several of her books were short-listed for the Carnegie Medal, and were selected as Notable Children’s Books by the American Library Association.