Ten-year-old Maria, an orphaned heiress living with her unpleasant guardians on a crumbling English estate called Malplaquet, finds her life changing in unimagined ways when she explores an overgrown island on the estate's lake and discovers the descendants of Gulliver's Lilliputians.

T(erence) H(anbury) White (1906-1964) was born in Bombay, India, and educated at Cambridge University. His childhood was unhappy--"my parents loathed each other," he later wrote--and he became a solitary person with a deep fund of strange lore and unusual enthusiasms. Fascinated by medieval life and legend, White taught himself Latin shorthand and translated a Latin bestiary. He taught himself the ancient art of falconry, which he wrote about in his book The Goshawk. Indeed, it was as a writer that he became famous, most of all for The Once and Future King, his wonderful retelling of the stories of King Arthur. An exceptional fisherman, an airplane pilot, and a deep-sea diver, T. H. White seemed to follow the same advice he has Merlin give in The Once and Future King "The best thing for being sad is to learn something."

Fritz Eichenberg (1901-1990) was born and raised in Germany, where he became a successful political cartoonist. The rise of Hitler made him worry about his family's safety, and in 1933 he left Germany for the United States, where he illustrated classics such as Crime and Punishment and Wuthering Heights, along with the pages of Dorothy Day's radical news-sheet The Catholic Worker. Eichenberg also founded the Pratt Graphic Arts Center in Manhattan. He considered his teaching work " a debt I have paid off to this country. . . . I'm very fond of America as a country that has welcomed so many people from different parts of the world without asking questions."