She finally returned to her craft in 1974 with Tim, a critically acclaimed novel about the romance between a female executive and a younger, mentally disabled gardener. She found jobs first in London and then at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.Īfter her beloved younger brother Carl died in 1965 at age 25 while rescuing two drowning women in the waters off Crete, a shattered McCullough quit writing.

Planning become a doctor, she found that she had a violent allergy to hospital soap and turned instead to neurophysiology – the study of the nervous system's functions. She flourished at Catholic schools and earned a physiology degree from the University of New South Wales in 1963. Raised by her mother in Wellington and then Sydney, McCullough began writing stories at age 5. And the land itself stark, relentless in its demands, brilliant in its flowering, prey to gigantic cycles of drought and flood, rich when nature is bountiful, surreal like no other place on earth.Īlternate Cover Edition ISBN 0380018179 (ISBN13: 9780380018178)Ĭolleen Margaretta McCullough was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds and Tim.

Wonderful characters people this book strong and gentle, Paddy, hiding a private memory dutiful Fiona, holding back love because it once betrayed her, violent, tormented Frank, and the other hardworking Cleary sons who give the boundless lands of Drogheda the energy and devotion most men save for women Meggie Ralph and Meggie's children, Justine and Dane. Ralph's course moves him a long way indeed, from a remote Outback parish to the halls of the Vatican and Meggie's except for a brief and miserable marriage elsewhere, is fixed to the Drogheda that is part of her bones - but distance does not dim their feelings though it shapes their lives. The central figures in this enthralling story are the indomitable Meggie, the only Cleary daughter, and the one man she truly loves, the stunningly handsome and ambitious priest Ralph de Bricassart.

It begins in the early part of the 20th century, when Paddy Cleary moves his wife, Fiona, and their seven children to Drogheda, the vast Australian sheep station owned by his autocratic and childless older sister and it ends more than half a century later, when the only survivor of the third generation, the brilliant actress Justine O'Neill, sets a course of life and love halfway around the world from her roots.

The Thorn Birds is a robust, romantic saga of a singular family, the Clearys.

The thorn birds by colleen mccullough