He also explains how guilt affects those around the guilty. .

             Adams' fifth novel, Maia, is a story about a young, beautiful girl who is thrown into slavery by her jealous mother. She makes friends with an exotic girl, Occula, who is sent on a mission from the gods to avenge her father's death by murdering the queen. Maia enters slavery, becomes a heroine by saving the Beklan army, falls in love, finds her long lost brother, and helps the rebels conquer Bekla, who then abolish slavery and establish equality throughout the empire.

             The themes in this novel are like those in Watership Down, and Plague Dogs. This novel, mostly because of its length (900+ pages), has many more themes than the other two novels. The main ones, though, are slavery and freedom, human dignity and rights, and survival against all odds.

             Freedom.

             FREEDOM - that consuming goal above doubt or criticism, desired as moths desire the candle or emigrants the distant continent waiting to parch them in its deserts or drive them to madness in its bitter winters!.Unfurl your banner, Freedom, and call upon me with cornet, flute, harp, sackbut.and all kinds of music to fall down and worship you, and I will do so upon the instant,.For we are free--free to suffer every anguish of deliberation, of decisions which must be made upon suspect information and half-knowledge, every anguish of hindsight and regret, of failure, shame and responsibility for all that we have brought upon ourselves and others: free to struggle, to starve, to demand from all one last, supreme effort to reach where we longed to be. .

             Freedom is one of the strongest themes in three of Adams' novels. In these novels, his characters are striving for freedom in some way, and, though their struggles end in victory, they see others who have given up their search for freedom, or were never allowed the opportunity to even begin searching for freedom.