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The Thorn Birds: A Family Novel Kindle Edition
“Beautiful….Compelling entertainment.” —New York Times
One of the most beloved novels of all time, The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough’s sweeping family saga of dreams, titanic struggles, dark passions, and forbidden love in the Australian Outback, returns to enthrall a new generation.
The Thorn Birds is a chronicle of three generations of Clearys—an indomitable clan of ranchers carving lives from a beautiful, hard land while contending with the bitterness, frailty, and secrets that penetrate their family. 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, and the haunted priest, Father Ralph de Bricassart—and the intense joining of two hearts and souls over a lifetime, a relationship that dangerously oversteps sacred boundaries of ethics and dogma.
“A heart-rending epic…truly marvelous.” —Chicago Tribune
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAvon
- Publication dateOctober 13, 2009
- File size1054 KB
Get to know this book
What's it about?
Forbidden love blossoms between a rancher's daughter and a priest in the harsh Australian Outback, challenging ethics and dogma.Popular highlight
Each of us has something within us which won’t be denied, even if it makes us scream aloud to die.716 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
“We all have contempt for whatever there’s too many of. Out here it’s sheep, but in the city it’s people.”550 Kindle readers highlighted thisPopular highlight
“Perfection in anything,” she said, “is unbearably dull. Myself, I prefer a touch of imperfection.”439 Kindle readers highlighted this
Editorial Reviews
Review
This gripping and passionate tale of an Australian family is a natural for audio presentation...Woods creates an audio edition that is as addictive to listen to as the book is to read. --AudioFile
''A heart-rending epic . . . truly marvelous'' --Chicago Tribune
From the Inside Flap
From the Back Cover
One of the most beloved novels of all time, Colleen McCullough's magnificent saga of dreams, struggles, dark passions, and forbidden love in the Australian outback has enthralled readers the world over. The Thorn Birds is a chronicle of three generations of Clearys—an indomitable clan of ranchers carving lives from a beautiful, hard land while contending with the bitterness, frailty, and secrets that penetrate their family. 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, and the haunted priest, Father Ralph de Bricassart—and the intense joining of two hearts and souls over a lifetime, a relationship that dangerously oversteps sacred boundaries of ethics and dogma.
About the Author
Colleen McCullough is the author of The Thorn Birds, Tim, An Indecent Obsession, A Creed for the Third Millennium, The Ladies of Missalonghi, The First Man in Rome, The Grass Crown, Fortune's Favorites, Caesar's Women, Caesar, and other novels. She lives with her husband on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Thorn Birds
By Colleen McCulloughBlackstone Audiobooks
Copyright © 1993 Colleen McCulloughAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780786103881
Chapter One
On December 8th, 1915, Meggie clearly had her fourth birthday. After the breakfast dishes were put away her mother silently thrust a brown paper parcel into her arms and ordered her outside. So Meggie squatted down behind the gorse bush next to the front gate and tugged impatiently. Her fingers were clumsy, the wrapping heavy; it smelled faintly of the Wahine general store, which told her that whatever lay inside the parcel had miraculously been bought, not homemadeor donated.
Something fine and mistily gold began to poke through a corner; she attacked the paper faster, peeling it away in long, ragged strips.
"Agnes! Oh, Agnes!" she said lovingly, blinking at the doll lying there in a tattered nest.
A miracle indeed. Only once in her life had Meggie been into Wahine; all the way back in May, because she had been a very good girl. So perched in the buggy beside her mother, on her best behavior, she had been too excited to see or remember much. Except for Agnes, the beautiful doll sitting on the store counter, dressed in a crinoline of pink satin with cream lace frills all over it. Right then and there in her mind she had christened it Agnes, the only name she knew elegant enough for such a peerless creature. Yet over the ensuing months her yearning after Agnes contained nothing of hope; Meggie didn't own a doll and had no idea little girls and dolls belonged together. She played happily with the whistles and slingshots and battered soldiers her brothers discarded, got her hands dirty and her boots muddy.
It never occurred to her that Agnes was to play with. Stroking the bright pink folds of the dress, grander than any she had ever seen on a human woman, she picked Agnes up tenderly. The doll had jointed arms and legs which could be moved anywhere; even her neck and tiny, shapely waist were jointed. Her golden hair was exquisitely dressed in a high pompadour studded with pearls, her pale bosom peeped out of a foaming fichu of cream lace fastened with a pearl pin. The finely painted bone china face was beautiful, left unglazed to give the delicately tinted skin a natural matte texture. Astonishingly lifelike blue eyes shone between lashes of real hair, their irises streaked and circled with a darker blue; fascinated, Meggie discovered that when Agnes lay back far enough, her eyes closed. High on one faintly flushed cheek she had a black beauty mark, and her dusky mouth was parted slightly to show tiny white teeth. Meggie put the doll gently on her lap, crossed her feet under her comfortably, and sat just looking.
She was still sitting behind the gorse bush when Jack and Hughie came rustling through the grass where it was too close to the fence to feel a scythe. Her hair was the typical Cleary beacon, all the Cleary children save Frank being martyred by a thatch some shade of red; Jack nudged his brother and pointed gleefully. They separated, grinning at each other, and pretended they were troopers after a Maori renegade. Meggie would not have heard them anyway, so engrossed was she in Agnes, humming softly to herself.
"What's that you've got, Meggie?" Jack shouted, pouncing. "Show us!"
"Yes, show us!" Hughie giggled, outflanking her.
She clasped the doll against her chest and shook her head: "No, she 's mine! I got her for my birthday!"
"Show us, go on! We just want to have a look."
Pride and joy won out. She held the doll so her brothers could see. "Look, isn't she beautiful? Her name is Agnes."
"Agnes? Agnes?" Jack gagged realistically. "What a soppy name! Why don't you call her Margaret or Betty?"
"Because she's Agnes!"
Hughie noticed the joint in the doll's wrist, and whistled. "Hey, Jack,look! It can move its hand!"
"Where? Let's see."
"No!" Meggie hugged the doll close again, tears forming. "No, you'll break her! Oh, Jack, don't take her awayyou'll break her!"
"Pooh!" His dirty brown hands locked about her wrists, closing tightly. "Want a Chinese burn? And don't be such a crybaby, or I'll tell Bob." He squeezed her skin in opposite directions until it stretched whitely, as Hughie got hold of the doll's skirts and pulled. "Gimme, or I'll do it really hard!"
"No! Don't, Jack, please don't! You'll break her, I know you will! Oh, please leave her alone! Don't take her, please!" In spite of the cruel grip on her wrists, she clung to the doll, sobbing and kicking.
"Got it," Hughie whooped, as the doll slid under Meggie 's crossed forearms.
Jack and Hughie found her just as fascinating as Meggie had; off came the dress, the petticoats and long, frilly drawers. Agnes lay naked while the boys pushed and pulled at her, forcing one foot round the back of her head, making her look down her spine, every possible contortion they could think of. They took no notice of Meggie as she stood crying; it did not occur to her to seek help, for in the Cleary family those who could not fight their own battles got scant aid or sympathy, and that went for girls, too.
The doll's golden hair tumbled down, the pearls flew winking into the long grass and disappeared. A dusty boot came down thoughtlessly on the abandoned dress, smearing grease from the smithy across its satin. Meggie dropped to her knees, scrabbling frantically to collect the miniature clothes before more damage was done them, then she began picking among the grass blades where she thought the pearls might have fallen. Her tears were blinding her, the grief in her heart new, for until now she had never owned anything worth grieving for.
Frank threw the shoe hissing into cold water and straightened his back; it didn't ache these days, so perhaps he was used to smithying. Not before time, his father would have said, after six months at it.
Continues...
Excerpted from The Thorn Birdsby Colleen McCullough Copyright © 1993 by Colleen McCullough. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
From AudioFile
Product details
- ASIN : B000FC146C
- Publisher : Avon (October 13, 2009)
- Publication date : October 13, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 1054 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 704 pages
- Page numbers source ISBN : 0732282241
- Best Sellers Rank: #15,105 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Colleen McCullough was born in Australia. A neuropathologist, she established the department of neurophysiology at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney before working as a researcher and teacher at Yale Medical School for ten years. Her writing career began with the publication of Tim, followed by The Thorn Birds, a record-breaking international bestseller. She lives on Norfolk Island in the South Pacific with her husband, Ric Robinson.
Customer reviews
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Top reviews from the United States
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I can be related this book personally. My father's parents were a war chaplain and a housewife. They met at the hospital where my grandmother's husband was very sick and died in Washington, DC. My Dad was a last one of her 5 sons. I heard it's a very interesting story in my family life.
This is a confusing book to review. I might just have to chalk this one up to a guilty pleasure kind of read, as it works on par the level of a soap opera with all the melodrama stirred up, emotions, tensions and familial tragedies that occur.
This seems like a book that doesn’t know what it wants to focus on. Portions of this book I felt more invested in than others. I liked how the book examines Ralph’s conflicted nature between love and his role with being a priest and his experiences with the Cleary family, but then much of this book ventures off into areas that I felt so indifferent too, especially in the final parts (Meggie’s spite, Luke, Justine, etc.) I also liked meeting the member of the Cleary family in the opening two parts and getting a little of the family history and their way of life.
What I do like about this novel is the Australian backdrop and descriptions of these settings McCullough takes the time to make sure to give the time and place much attention to detail and I think in a larger sense this gives the background of the novel a more realistic and rich feel. I also enjoyed McCullough’s ability to construct this with the feel of the family saga over generations.
That being said, I mostly enjoyed about the first three hundred or so pages, but said enjoyment began to wane as characters began to grate on my nerves and some of the ridiculousness of the plot infiltrated to the point of no return. I think everything after this point sort of took a big nosedive.
Also, some of the characters started to annoy the heck out of me. The second half of the book seems like it just focuses on Meggie and her bitter, sad existence (cry me a river) and her shaking her fists at the world and God as well as focus on her narcissistic, selfish, annoying daughter, Justine. It completely shifts from one of the main crux of the conflict it sets up and instead heads off into focus on menial, minor characters or subplots that aren’t as interesting.
Additionally, something irked me about how much focus there was on a character’s appearance. Is it really necessary to give a rundown of every thought via interior monologue going through a character’s head about another character’s physical attributes? There was too much unnecessary description about a character’s physique that it became belabored.
The latter portions of the book, as described prior, move away from one of the central conflicts and into other areas, and this is where the book really loses steam. I had to put down the book several times because my interested lessened with each page. Not only that, but with each passing page Meggie becomes less sympathetic and her story more a chore to the point where the reader is like “Okay, get on with it.”
It get the epic feel of The Thorn Birds as a family saga and the lovely descriptions of Australia, but there are just too many things going on for little payoff: story lines or characters who do not engage interest for the long haul or are not fully explored enough to engage the reader, or interesting plots or characters that are left by the wayside altogether.
Top reviews from other countries
He is not ready to accept the fact that his autopilot had caused him to fall in love with this girl. Like I told you, you simply must read this book if you enjoy reading.