While at Yale she wrote her first two books. She spent 10 years (April 1967 to 1976) researching and teaching in the Department of Neurology at the Yale Medical School in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. In 1963, McCullough moved for four years to the United Kingdom at the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London she met the chairman of the neurology department at Yale University who offered her a research associate job at Yale. Instead, she switched to neuroscience and worked at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney. In her first year of medical studies at the University of Sydney she suffered dermatitis from surgical soap and was told to abandon her dreams of becoming a medical doctor. īefore her tertiary education, McCullough earned a living as a teacher, librarian and journalist. She based a character in The Thorn Birds on him, and also wrote about him in Life Without the Boring Bits. She had a younger brother, Carl, who drowned off the coast of Crete when he was 25 while trying to rescue tourists in difficulty.
Her family eventually settled in Sydney where she attended Holy Cross College, Woollahra, having a strong interest in both science and the humanities. During her childhood, the family moved around a great deal and she was also "a voracious reader". Her father was of Irish descent and her mother was a New Zealander of part- Māori descent. McCullough was born in 1937 in Wellington, in the Central West region of New South Wales, to James and Laurie McCullough. With extraordinary vividness Colleen McCullough engages our sympathy for each character and gives this ancient saga a contemporary sense of urgency and excitement.Īn unputdownable read and the best possible way to introduce a new generation of readers to one of the greatest stories ever told.Colleen Margaretta McCullough AO ( / m ə ˈ k ʌ l ə/ married name Robinson, previously Ion-Robinson 1 June 1937 – 29 January 2015) was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being The Thorn Birds and The Ladies of Missalonghi. We meet Odysseus, doomed to wander the Aegean for twenty long years brave Achilles, who is haunted by the mad shade of his mother the heroes Hektor and Ajax, and many more.Ĭhapter by chapter the narrative is handed from one character to another as the long years of siege, bloody battles, love and death unfold and the gods exact their retribution.
Here is powerful King Agamemnon with his terrifyingly ambitious wife Klytemnestra and his soothsaying mistress Kassandra. Here is the enchanting Helen, who we first meet as a spoiled teenager and whose passion for the handsome, reckless Paris leads to the betrayal of her husband, King Menelaus, and the fall of the House of Troy. The tragic and terrible drama of the war between Greeks and Trojans, the long siege of Troy, and the impact of one woman's beauty on the fate of two nations, is played out again in this dazzling novel based on Homer's Iliad.
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