Now and then, more out of carelessness than conspiracy, a really first-rate book nearly dies of the reviewing community's neglect. Consider Joan Brady's novel Theory of War. It appeared in early 1993 and sank like a stone. Reviews were scanty, sales scarcely visible. Ms. Brady calculates that Knopf sold fewer than 7,000 copies.

Now, it is here in trade paperback and, after a glittering success abroad, may have a brighter future. So far, the book has been acquired for publication in seven other languages, including Korean, and Hollywood seems to be hungering to transform it into a film. Most significantly, it wears the prestige of the 1993 Whitbread award, an annual British honor never before conferred on a woman or an American, and one that also brought Ms. Brady the equivalent of $31,000, plus acres of media attention and, of course, serious sales in England.

Ms. Brady, who has lived in the postcard-pretty Devon town of Totnes for more than 20 years, was in the U.S. not long ago on the obligatory multicity visit designed to persuade American readers that her novel was worth their time. It surely is: a finely wrought, ironic and haunting tale of a forgotten piece of Americana. In the ferociously hard days just after the Civil War, Ms. Brady's grandfather, a four-year-old white boy, was sold for $15 to a hard-up Kansas farmer. For lack of documentary material, his granddaughter has imagined his cruel boyhood in bondage and its searing effects on virtually everyone he touched in later life.

A sunny, loquacious woman, Ms. Brady is an enviably brave one as well: At 54 years of age, she offers to public view a handsome face entirely innocent of makeup. She is also conspicuously multitalented. She began her working life as teenage ballerina in San Francisco and moved on to George Balanchine's troupe in New York. Then she gave up dancing to take a degree in philosophy, with Phi Beta Kappa honors, at Columbia University.

The impulse to set words to paper arrived only after she had been a wife and mother for some years. She had married Dexter Masters, a writer who had been director of the Consumers Union, and they produced a son; in the mid-1960s they decided they wanted to live in the English countryside and moved abroad. Her first book, The Imposter, a novel published in 1979, left the critics unimpressed. Her second, The Unmaking of a Dancer, an autobiographical work, found a better reception but failed to sell.

Undaunted, in the early '80s Ms. Brady began to think about her grandfather's history. When she was growing up in Berkeley, Calif., where her father was a professor of economics, Grandpa Brady was part of a repertoire of bedtime stories, "the boogie man, the scary figure of childhood." The meaning of a child's cruel servitude did not register on a small girl. What she chiefly remembered was the intensity of her father's feelings about his father. "You could hear the dislike, the resentment, the hatred," she says now.

But as an adult she began to understand how the experience must have poisoned Alexander Brady's life. He had escaped at 16, worked on the new frontier railroads, gone to school to become a preacher, developed a fruit farm in Washington State, married and produced seven children. Four of them, including Ms. Brady's father, were suicides; a fifth became alcoholic. When she talked to a surviving aunt and uncle, they confirmed what she already sensed: "He was a cold, distant man. You couldn't get close to him."

Indeed, while working at her computer, Ms. Brady would find herself in a sour state of irritation at her chief character. "Why the hell couldn't he be nicer?" she would ask herself. "I was forgetting what had happened to him. I set him up and could not keep in mind how deeply damaged he was." Ms. Brady actually had intended to write a history but soon learned there were no sources to be mined, no recorded facts, no figures. All she knew was that in the aftermath of the Civil War, some destitute parents or guardians sold very young children to be "bounden out" labor until they turned 21. "They were valuable weeding machines," she realized. The practice was not indenture, which had some legal safeguards; it was illegal and, for that reason, probably so clandestine that few written records were left.

When Ms. Brady found that all the details she knew about the practice covered no more than two pages, she began to think about fiction. Her acknowledgements include thanks to her late husband, the author of a successful novel, The Accident. He "taught me all I know about writing," she wrote, and supplied "the best line in the book."

Early in the narrative, Ms. Brady was having trouble with a scene in which a Kansas farmer set out to find a child for sale. Dexter Masters's suggestion ignited the narrative: As casually as he might order a sack of flour, the farmer drops into the town general store and tells the owner, "I want to buy a boy."

In 1986, work on Theory of War was suspended. Mr. Masters, many years his wife's senior, was stricken with a series of devastating illnesses; for four years he was almost helpless. Without funds for nursing assistance, all her attention went into his care. Her way of coping with difficulties under those circumstances was to focus on an orderly, undemanding subject. She spent spare moments working on problems in advanced algebra.

After Masters died in 1989, Ms. Brady went back to the novel. She stumbled on her title while reading Karl von Clausewitz on military strategy. She was writing about the near-fatal antagonism between the slave boy and the farmer's mean-spirited son when she came across a Clausewitz passage proposing that "a battle between nations was not unlike a battle between two people." Clausewitzian theory became her metaphor for the sometimes savage defensive war the slave boy waged in order to survive.

Before her trip here, Ms. Brady had just completed a visit to the Netherlands, where her book was greeted with abundant enthusiasm. She was bemused to find that the European view of its failure in the U.S. is that Americans, already burdened with the grievous history of black slavery, don't want to confront a "skeleton in the cupboard." A conspicuously non-paranoid person, she is inclined to think the neglect was just "bad luck."

The Whitbread money, meanwhile, has been more than an incentive to treat herself to baubles and bubble gum. Lacking both income and pension, Ms. Brady counts herself lucky to have a tenant paying rent on the garage apartment at her Totnes property. So far, the only want she has indulged is trading in a small, old German car for a small, slightly younger used French car.

Meanwhile, profitably work-obsessed, she has planned a writing schedule that should keep her busy for a while. She had written a book on an aspect of American medicine which she is now turning to a novel; she is taking physics courses so that she can proceed with another novel about a scientist. And oh yes, her algebra exercises: They led to the discovery of Evariste Galois, a French genius who died before his 21st birthday in a duel after inventing an entire subbranch of mathematics that now bears his name. He is to be the subject of a nonfiction work when she is done with her physicist.