Minke is a young Javanese student of great intelligence and ambition. Living equally among the colonists and colonized of 19th-century Java, he battles against the confines of colonial strictures. It is his love for Annelies that enables him to find the strength to embrace his world.

In Child of All Nations, the reader is immediately swept up by a story that is profoundly feminist, devastatingly anticolonialist—and full of heartbreak, suspense, love, and fury. Pramoedya immerses the reader in a world that is astonishing in its vividness: the cultural whirlpool that was the Dutch East Indies of the 1890s. A story of awakening, it follows Minke, the main character of This Earth of Mankind, as he struggles to overcome the injustice all around him. Pramoedya's full literary genius is evident in the brilliant characters that populate this world: Minke's fragile Mixed-Race wife; a young Chinese revolutionary; an embattled Javanese peasant and his impoverished family; the French painter Jean Marais, to name just a few.

With House Of Glass comes the final chapter of Pramoedya's epic quartet, set in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the century. A novel of heroism, passion, and betrayal, it provides a spectacular conclusion to a series hailed as one of the great works of modern literature. At the start of House of Glass, Minke, writer and leader of the dissident movement, is now imprisoned - and the narrative has switched to Pangemanann, a former policeman, who has the task of spying and reporting on those who continue the struggle for independence. But the hunter is becoming the hunted. Pangemanann is a victim of his own conscience and has come to admire his adversaries. He must decide whether the law is to safeguard the rights of the people or to control the people. He fears the loss of his position, his family, and his self-respect. At last Pangemanann sees that his true opponents are not Minke and his followers, but rather the dynamism and energy of a society awakened.

Set in a Dutch East Indies painfully struggling to emerge from the yoke of colonial domination and the shackles of tradition, this third installment in the author's masterwork presents a devastating new chapter in the lives of its characters.

Minke is a young Javanese student of great intelligence and ambition. Living equally among the colonists and colonized of 19th-century Java, he battles against the confines of colonial strictures. It is his love for Annelies that enables him to find the strength to embrace his world.