Washington Post Book World
“McCullough is terrific... Her characters quiver with life.”
The New York Times Book Review
“A treat for those who troll bookstores searching for real historical fiction... As compelling as any novel of contemporary power seekers.”
Houston Post
“Political infighting and power plays; the slaughters and strategies of war; plots thick and nasty... A grandly meaty historical novel... Rich with gracefully integrated research and thundering to the beat of marching Roman legions.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A great Goliath of a novel... Perhaps the most thoroughly researched historical novel ever written... A genuine tour de force.”
Milwaukee Journal
“An intricate characterization of an age, agile in its movement from the minute details of household management to the precise composition of the military colossus Rome repeatedly mustered to repel the Teutonic hordes... An accomplishment so edifying as to be compelling.”
New York Daily News
“The most spectacular of her books... A fascinating history lesson that shows the timelessness of human ambition and misbehaviour... The best work McCullough has ever done.”
Sacramento Bee
“An exciting story of tangled lives and epic events... This novel really grabbed me after a few pages, and I savored it to the end... Republican Rome may be distant in time, but through McCullough’s talent for storytelling and intimate knowledge of the Roman life style, the world becomes alive and pertinent to the contemporary reader.”
Pittsburgh Press
“Crosses battle lines and boundaries. Deaths, births, prophecies, political alliances and rivalries create a whirlwind of drama. McCullough intermingles the high and the low-assassins, soldiers, wives and mistresses—to weave an intriguing tapestry of a great empire.”
Washington Times
“A serious historical novel that edifies while it entertains... McCullough tells a good story, describing political intrigue, social infighting and bloody battles with authoritative skill, interpolating domestic drama and even a soupgon of romance... Fascinating reading... A memorable picture of an age with many aspects that share characteristics with our own.”
Publishers Weekly
“Admirable... Colleen McCullough is an energetic yarn-spinner... Her research is extensive enough to win her half a dozen PhD degrees, and she throws nothing away... A bestseller of higher aspiration.”
Newsday
About the Author
COLLEEN MCCULLOUGH was born in Wellington, New South Wales in 1937. A neuroscientist by training, she worked in hospitals in Sydney and the UK before settling into ten years of research and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in the USA.
In 1974 her first novel, Tim, was published, followed by the international bestseller The Thorn Birds in 1977. Colleen McCullough now lives with her husband on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific.
Also by Colleen McCullough
Bittersweet
From author of The Thorn Birds, one of the biggest-selling books of all time, comes this epic saga of love, betrayal, ambition and redemption in 1920s Australia.
The four Latimer sisters are famous throughout New South Wales for their beauty, wit and ambition. They have always been close; always happy. They thought this would never change.
But then they left home to train as nurses, swapping the feather beds of their father’s townhouse for the spartan bunks of nursing accommodation. And now, as the Depression casts its shadow across Australia, they must confront their own secret desires as the world changes around them. Will they find the independence they crave? Or is life – like love – always bittersweet?
Bittersweet is available here.
Jump to a free preview here
The Thorn Birds
In the rugged Australian Outback, three generations of Cleary’s live through joy and sadness, bitter defeat and magnificent triumph. Driven by their dreams, sustained by remarkable strength of character… and torn by dark passions, violence and a scandalous family legacy of forbidden love.
It is a poignant love story, a powerful epic of struggle and sacrifice, a celebration of individuality and spirit. Most of all, it is the story of the Clearys’ only daughter, Meggie, who can never possess the man she so desperately adores –Ralph de Bricassart. Ralph will rise from parish priest to the inner circles of the Vatican... but his passion for Meggie will follow him all the days of his life.
The Thorn Birds is available here.
Tim
Forty-three-year-old Mary Horton lives in a quiet, middle-class suburb on Sydney’s North Shore. A straight-laced, emotionally distant spinster, Mary has worked hard to make a life for herself, but her idea of ‘life’ does not include personal relationships. With no partner and no friends, Mary has no plans to let anybody into her solitary life.
Tim Melville is a twenty-five-year-old labourer with the body and face of a Greek god, but the mind of a child. A gentle outcast in a cruel, unbending world, Tim has a loving family, but is often derided and taken advantage of by his so-called friends.
By chance, one summer morning Tim meets Mary and what begins as a day’s labour for the kind-hearted young man becomes a life-changing relationship for both of them.
Tim is available here.
An Indecent Obsession
The Second World War has just ended and Sister Honour Langtree, a caring and conscientious Army nurse, cares for a striking mixture of five battle-broken soldiers being treated in the psychiatric care ward of a hospital in the South Pacific. To the soldiers, Honour is a precious, adored reminder of the world before war – they are as devoted to her as she is to them.
Then Sergeant Michael Wilson arrives, disrupting her ward’s precarious harmony. A damaged and decorated hero, Wilson is a man of secrets and silent pain, and as Honour finds herself inexorably drawn to this tortured man, she discovers a love that will leave her torn between her duty to all her patients – and her love for one of them…
An Indecent Obsession is available here.
The Song of Troy
It was a clash of arms that would echo through the millennia: a hard-fought conflict born of love, pride, greed and revenge; a decade-long siege of the ancient world’s greatest city from which nobody would escape unscathed.
As urgent and passionate as if told for the first time, international besteller Colleen McCullough breathes life into legend, swinging our sympathies from Greece to Troy and back again as they move inexorably towards a fate not even the gods themselves can avert. Here are Greek princess Helen, sensuous and self-indulgent, who deserts a dull husband for the sake of the equally self-indulgent Trojan prince Paris; the haunted warrior Achilles; the heroically noble Hektor; the subtle and brilliant Odysseus; Priam, King of Troy, doomed to make the wrong decisions for the right reasons; and Agamemnon, King of Kings, who consents to the unspeakable to launch his thousand ships, incurring the terrifying wrath of his wife, Klytemnestra.
The Song of Troy is available here.
