Few works of literature have inspired so vast an audience across so many radically different languages and cultures as the Ramayana, written in Sanskrit over 2,000 years ago by a poet known to us as Valmiki. William Buck has retold the story of Prince Rama--with all its nobility of spirit, courtly intrigue, heroic renunciation, fierce battles, and triumph of good over evil--in a length and with a style that make the great epic accessible without compromising the spirit and lyricism of the original.