Colleen McCullough to publish big, new novel - to rival The Thorn Birds says her publisher

Colleen McCullough is the bestselling Australian fiction writer of all time, with a staggering 30 million copies of her most famous 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds, sold around the world.  She has always sworn that she would never write The Thorn Birds 2, enjoying instead the creative challenge of writing across genres – from crime novels to a memoir to a sequel to Pride and Prejudice.  The bestselling novels Morgan’s Run and The Touch have been the closest she has come to satisfying the millions of fans around the world who have long been clamouring for more in the same vein.

But now Colleen McCullough, at 75, has written a page-turning novel to rival The Thorn Birds in scope and romance – and called it Bittersweet. As the Norfolk Island-based author says, ‘the tears, crises, sorrows and ecstasies young women suffer when they fall in love is a fascinating subject – love, I think, is always bittersweet.’

 Set in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales in the years leading up to and including the Great Depression, Bittersweet is the story of four sisters who are both of and ahead of their time. Colleen explains further: ‘When one has written some pretty famous books, great care must be taken to have time, place and characters bear no resemblance to books already written. Instead of one heroine of an age, four seemed like a challenge, so were born Edda and Grace, the senior twins, and Kitty and Tufts, the junior twins, plus the mixture of men who were important to them. What emerged was a big story of days gone by, when women had a far harder time of it than they do today, and the world hovered between depression and war.’

 HarperCollins Australia publisher Anna Valdinger says, ‘This engrossing historical saga has all the elements that made The Thorn Birds so unforgettable – a complex and fascinating family, the epic sweep of history and an exploration of love in all its forms.  From the first page I was gripped, living each moment of the sisters’ lives alongside them – from love and loss to betrayal and redemption. It’s an emotional rollercoaster which has already captured the hearts and imaginations of everyone who has read it – men and women alike. This will be one of the biggest titles on the shelves this Christmas.’

 Bittersweet will be published by HarperCollins in October 2013 in hardback (rrp: $54.00) and e-book