Showing results by author "Colleen McCullough" in All Categories

The Hurlingford family have ruled the small town of Byron for generations. Wealthy, powerful and cruel, they get what they want, every time. Missy Wright, a Hurlingford by birth, has been shunned by her family since marrying for love, not money. Now widowed, she lives quiet existence in genteel poverty. But then a stranger arrives in town; a divorcee from Sydney. She opens Missy's eyes to the possibility of a happy ending.

Sometimes when he didn't know he was being watched, Meggie would look at him and try desperately to imprint his face upon her brain's core. And he would turn to find her watching him, a look in his eyes of haunted grief, a doomed look. She understood the implicit message, or thought she did; he must go, back to the Church and his duties. Never again with the same spirit, perhaps, but more able to serve. For only those who have slipped and fallen know the vicissitudes of the way.

Bittersweet follows the lives of four sisters - two pairs of twins. Edda, Grace, Kitty, and Tufts are about to become the first batch of nurses to be professionally trained in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. For Edda, it is the closest she can come to her dream of being a doctor. For Grace, the hospital is a terrifying place of sickness and mess, while Tufts discovers her hidden talents. For Kitty, it is a way to escape the suffocating love of her mother, who can see nothing beyond Kitty's astonishing beauty.

The new crime novel that will have you up all night from Australia's best-loved storyteller. It's a beautiful spring day in the little city of Holloman, Connecticut; the year is 1967, and the world teeters on the brink of nuclear holocaust as the Cold War goes relentlessly on.

The four Latimer sisters were famous throughout New South Wales for their beauty, wit and sisterly love. But then they left home to train as nurses, swapping their feather beds for the bunks of nursing accommodation. And now, as the Depression casts its shadow across Australia, they must confront their own secret desires. Will the sisters find the independence they crave? Or is life - like love - always bittersweet?

At Connecticut's most prestigious medical research institute, something is very wrong. It's the 1960s and America is in ferment, but at the Hug, the daily business of research continues, and the hierarchies of power remain undisturbed. That is, until the body of a woman is found in one of the animal research laboratories one morning - and then another.

America in 1968 is in turmoil and the leafy Holloman suburb of Carew is being silently terrorised by a series of vicious and systematic rapes. When finally one victim finds the courage to speak out and go to the police, the rapist escalates to murder. For Captain Carmine Delmonico, it seems to be a case with no clues. And it comes as the Holloman Police Department is troubled: A lieutenant is out of his depth, a sergeant is out of control, and into this mix comes the beautiful, ruthlessly ambitious new trainee, Helen MacIntosh, daughter of the influential president of Chubb University.

Jim and Millie Hunter have it all: good looks, brilliant minds, and a meteoric rise to fame. Dr Jim Hunter is a genius biochemist, and author of a smash-hit science book that is propelling him to the top. His wife Millie, is a blonde bombshell and fellow scientist, researching rare poisons derived from puffer fish. They seem to have it all, but others in their academic circle have got the knives out, jealous of their success - and their inter-racial relationship arouses prejudice.

Tim was a beautiful young man with the mind of a child. Mary Horton was a lonely and bitter middle-aged spinster. They were outcasts in a cruel, unbending world – until their lives were joined and forever altered by the forbidden promise of a very special love.

From the bestselling author of The Thorn Birds and The First Man in Rome comes an exhilarating new novel. Colleen McCullough takes us back to 1960 and Sydney's notorious Kings Cross, and the story of a young woman determined to defy convention. Twenty-one year-old Harriet, a newly qualified X-ray technician earning a coveted male wage, ignores her father's warning that "only fools, Bohemians and tarts live in Kings Cross" and moves into Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz's rooming house.

Twenty years on, each of Mary's four sisters is settled in her own way: Jane has a happy marriage and a large family; Lizzie and Mr Darcy have a formidable social reputation; Lydia has a reputation of quite another kind; and Kitty is in demand in London's fashionable salons. Mary, however, is a changed woman, and newly independent of family obligations. Now she is afire with resolve - to publish a book revealing the ills of England and the plight of the poor.

The year is 1967 and the world teeters on the brink of nuclear holocaust as the Cold War goes relentlessly on. On a beautiful spring day in the little city of Holloman, Connecticut, chief of detectives Carmine Delmonico walks into the prestigious Chubb University halls to be greeted by a limp corpse clamped in a bear trap, all traces of life drained from it. And this is just the beginning.