The Mahabharata, often called “India’s Iliad,” tells of several generations of the royal family of Kuru: their ambitions, loves, moral dilemmas, and battles for a kingdom. As tradition has it, the heroes are the five Pandava brothers and their shared wife, Draupadi; the villain is their power-mad cousin, Duryodhana. In this retelling Jocelyn Davis inverts the story by asking if Duryodhana was not the villain, but the hero of the tale. This brings a series of questions that Davis’ retelling seeks to answer.