Colleen McCullough Books & Series: Complete Guide

Colleen McCullough wrote two of the most ambitious historical novels of the twentieth century and then kept going. The Thorn Birds turned a sheep station in New South Wales into one of the most widely read family sagas ever written, and the seven-book Masters of Rome series rebuilt the last century of the Roman Republic in more detail than any novelist before her.

She came to fiction late, from a career in neuroscience, and she brought a researcher’s habits with her: glossaries, maps, character drawings and footnoted arguments with historians. This guide covers every novel she published, from Tim in 1974 to Bittersweet in 2013, with reading orders for both of her series and advice on where to start.

This page contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no extra cost to you.

About Colleen

Early Life and Background

Colleen Margaretta McCullough was born on 1 June 1937 in Wellington, New South Wales, a country town in central western NSW. She grew up in rural New South Wales and in Sydney, and the landscapes of her childhood (dry plains, sheep country, small towns) became the setting of her most famous book.

She studied science at the University of Sydney and trained in neurophysiology. That choice shaped the first half of her adult life: she worked in hospital research in Sydney and London before moving to the United States.

A Scientist Who Became a Novelist

For about ten years McCullough worked as a research neurophysiologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She began writing fiction in her spare time while still working in the laboratory.

Her first novel, Tim, appeared in 1974. It was a quiet, well-reviewed contemporary story set in Sydney, and it gave her enough confidence to attempt something much larger.

That larger book was The Thorn Birds (1977). It became an international bestseller, its paperback rights sold for a record sum, and its success allowed McCullough to leave science and write full time.

Norfolk Island and the Later Years

In the early 1980s McCullough settled on Norfolk Island, a small Australian territory in the South Pacific. She married Ric Robinson there in 1984 and lived on the island for the rest of her life.

Norfolk Island is where she researched and wrote the Masters of Rome series, a project that took nearly two decades. It also became part of her fiction: the island’s convict history runs through Morgan’s Run.

McCullough died on Norfolk Island on 29 January 2015, aged 77. She kept writing into her seventies, despite failing eyesight, and published her last novel, Bittersweet, in 2013.

Writing Style and Approach

McCullough wrote big. Her novels are long, densely populated and driven by strong-willed characters who want something badly, whether that is a priest torn between ambition and love or a Roman general reaching for a seventh consulship.

Her research method was close to academic. The Masters of Rome books include extensive glossaries, maps and her own pencil portraits of the main characters, drawn from surviving busts and coins. She was willing to argue with ancient sources in her author’s notes and to explain where she had chosen one historian’s version over another.

She was also a genre-hopper. Over four decades she wrote family saga, ancient epic, wartime drama, dystopian fiction, a Jane Austen sequel, a convict novel and a series of 1960s police procedurals. What links them is her interest in power, ambition and the cost of both.

Colleen McCullough Series in Reading Order

McCullough wrote two series. The Masters of Rome is her major achievement in historical fiction; the Carmine Delmonico novels are crime fiction set in 1960s Connecticut, which today reads as period fiction in its own right.

Series 1: Masters of Rome

Setting: Rome and the wider Mediterranean, 110 BC to 27 BC

Number of Books: 7 books, complete

Main Characters: Gaius Marius, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cleopatra and Octavian

The series follows the collapse of the Roman Republic across eighty years, one generation handing its feuds to the next. Each book stands on real history, so you know where it ends, but McCullough’s interest is in how each step happened and what it cost the people involved. For a full book-by-book guide, see our Masters of Rome reading order.

Reading Order:

1. The First Man in Rome (1990)

Rome, 110 to 100 BC. Gaius Marius, a wealthy outsider from the Italian countryside, and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, a penniless aristocrat, both set out to reach the top of a Republic that has no room for either of them. The book introduces the families and rivalries that drive the whole series.

2. The Grass Crown (1991)

Rome and Italy, 98 to 86 BC. Rome’s Italian allies demand citizenship, and the dispute turns into open war. Marius and Sulla, once allies, find themselves on opposite sides as the Republic’s rules start to break.

3. Fortune’s Favourites (1993)

Rome and the provinces, 83 to 69 BC. Sulla holds power in Rome while two young men begin their careers: the ambitious general Pompey and a teenage Julius Caesar. Published in the US as Fortune’s Favorites.

4. Caesar’s Women (1996)

Rome, 68 to 58 BC. Caesar climbs the political ladder in the city itself, and the novel follows him through the women in his life: his mother Aurelia, his daughter Julia, his lover Servilia and his wives. Cato, Cicero and Pompey are the rivals he has to outmanoeuvre.

5. Caesar (1997)

Gaul and Italy, 54 to 48 BC. Caesar fights the final years of the Gallic War while his enemies in Rome work to destroy him, and the standoff ends at the Rubicon.

6. The October Horse (2002)

Egypt, Rome and the East, 48 to 41 BC. Caesar arrives in Alexandria and meets Cleopatra, then returns to a Rome he now controls. The Ides of March falls in this book, and the second half follows the struggle among his heirs.

7. Antony and Cleopatra (2007)

The eastern Mediterranean and Rome, 41 to 27 BC. Mark Antony and Cleopatra build their alliance in the East while Octavian consolidates his hold on Rome. The book brings the Republic’s story to a close.

Complete Masters of Rome Reading Order Guide

Series 2: Carmine Delmonico

Setting: The fictional city of Holloman, Connecticut, 1965 to the end of the 1960s

Number of Books: 5 books, complete

Main Character: Carmine Delmonico, a detective with the Holloman police

Holloman is a thinly disguised New Haven, and Chubb University stands in for Yale, the university where McCullough spent a decade as a scientist. The series mixes police procedural with 1960s politics, campus science and Cold War nerves, and it draws on her own memories of laboratory life.

Reading Order:

1. On, Off (2005)

Holloman, 1965. Body parts are found at the Hughlings Jackson Center, an elite neurological research institute attached to Chubb University. Lieutenant Carmine Delmonico discovers a pattern of earlier killings and starts the hunt for a careful, patient murderer.

2. Too Many Murders (2009)

Holloman, 1967. Twelve very different people are murdered on a single day. Carmine, now a captain, has to work out which deaths are connected while a Cold War espionage case lands on his desk at the same time.

3. Naked Cruelty (2010)

Holloman, late 1960s. A string of carefully planned attacks on local women terrifies the town. Carmine’s department is stretched thin as he searches for an attacker who hides behind a respectable face.

4. The Prodigal Son (2012)

Holloman, late 1960s. A lethal neurotoxin taken from pufferfish goes missing from a Chubb University laboratory, and unexplained deaths follow. Carmine has to find a killer among brilliant scientists and bitter academic politics.

5. Sins of the Flesh (2013)

Holloman, end of the 1960s. Mutilated bodies of young men begin to appear around the city. It is the final case of the series.

Standalone Novels by Colleen McCullough

More than half of McCullough’s novels are standalones, and they range across three thousand years. Here they are in publication order.

Tim (1974)

Sydney, early 1970s. Mary Horton, a successful, solitary businesswoman in middle age, hires Tim Melville, a handsome young labourer with an intellectual disability, to work in her garden. Their friendship grows into something neither of them, nor the people around them, expected.

The Thorn Birds (1977)

New Zealand and New South Wales, 1915 to 1969. The Cleary family moves from New Zealand to Drogheda, a vast sheep station in the Australian outback, and the novel follows three generations through drought, fire, war and family loyalty. At its centre is Meggie Cleary and her lifelong bond with Ralph de Bricassart, an ambitious Catholic priest.

An Indecent Obsession (1981)

A military hospital on a Pacific island, 1945. Sister Honour Langtry runs Ward X, a ward for soldiers whose minds have been damaged by the war, and she has made it a small family. As the war ends, a new patient arrives and the balance of the ward begins to shift.

A Creed for the Third Millennium (1985)

The United States in the near future, during a new ice age. A government searching for a way to lift a frightened, despairing population finds Joshua Christian, a psychiatrist with a gift for giving people hope. This is McCullough’s one venture into speculative fiction.

The Ladies of Missalonghi (1987)

A small town in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, early twentieth century. Missy Wright, a poor and overlooked spinster in a town dominated by one powerful family, decides to take her life into her own hands. It is a short, comic novel and a complete change of pace from her epics.

The Song of Troy (1998)

Greece and Troy, Late Bronze Age. McCullough retells the Trojan War through many narrators, including Priam, Helen, Achilles, Odysseus and Hector, and grounds the legend in the politics and trade of the period. She wrote it between Masters of Rome volumes.

Morgan’s Run (2000)

Bristol, the voyage of the First Fleet and Norfolk Island, 1770s to 1790s. Richard Morgan, a hardworking Bristol gunsmith, is convicted and transported to the new penal colony in Australia. The novel follows him through the voyage and the early years of settlement on the island where McCullough herself lived.

The Touch (2003)

Scotland and New South Wales, second half of the nineteenth century. Elizabeth Drummond leaves Kinross in Scotland to marry a wealthy cousin she has never met, Alexander Kinross, who has made his fortune in the Australian colonies. The novel follows her new life and the town he has built.

Angel (2004)

Kings Cross, Sydney, 1960. Harriet Purcell, a young X-ray technician, leaves her family home to live in a boarding house in Sydney’s most colourful neighbourhood, among a cast of eccentric neighbours. First published in Australia as Angel Puss.

The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet (2008)

England, two decades after the events of Pride and Prejudice. Mary, the plain and bookish middle Bennet sister, is finally free of family duty and sets out to see the condition of England’s poor for herself. McCullough’s sequel is affectionate towards Austen’s world but takes it in its own direction.

Bittersweet (2013)

Corunda, New South Wales, 1920s. Two sets of twin sisters, the Latimers, enter nurse training at the local hospital at a time when nursing is becoming a profession rather than a duty. Her final novel, it returns to the country towns of her youth.

Nonfiction

McCullough also wrote a biography of the Australian war hero and governor Sir Roden Cutler, The Courage and the Will (1999), and a book of autobiographical pieces, Life Without the Boring Bits (2011). Both are worth knowing about, but this guide focuses on her fiction.

Where to Start with Colleen McCullough

Best First Book

Recommendation: The Thorn Birds

It is the book that made her name and still the one most readers know. It is long, but it moves quickly, and it shows everything she does well: a vivid landscape, strong women, an impossible love and fifty years of family history.

If you already know The Thorn Birds, start the Masters of Rome with The First Man in Rome. The series should be read in order, and the first book explains the Roman political system as it goes, so no background is needed.

If You Want…

Ancient Rome in full detail: Start with The First Man in Rome, the first of the seven Masters of Rome novels.

Julius Caesar specifically: Start with Fortune’s Favourites, where Caesar first appears as a young man, though the earlier two books add a great deal.

A family saga: The Thorn Birds or Bittersweet.

Australian colonial history: Morgan’s Run for the convict era, or The Touch for the late nineteenth century.

Greek myth retold: The Song of Troy.

Something short and light: The Ladies of Missalonghi, a short comic novel.

A crime series with a period setting: On, Off, the first Carmine Delmonico novel.

Books by Time Period

Bronze Age Greece and Troy

The Song of Troy

The Late Roman Republic

The Masters of Rome series, all seven books

Explore more books about the ancient world and our best ancient Rome historical fiction.

The Eighteenth Century and the Convict Era

Morgan’s Run

The Early Nineteenth Century

The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet

The Victorian Era and Colonial Australia

The Touch

Explore more books about the Victorian era.

The Early Twentieth Century

The Thorn Birds (opens in 1915)
The Ladies of Missalonghi
Bittersweet

The Second World War

An Indecent Obsession

Explore more books about World War II.

The 1960s and 1970s

Angel
The Carmine Delmonico series
Tim (contemporary when published)

The Future

A Creed for the Third Millennium

Popular Colleen McCullough Books and Series

Masters of Rome

The Masters of Rome is one of the largest projects in historical fiction: seven long novels covering roughly eighty years, from the rise of Gaius Marius to the victory of Octavian. McCullough spent years on research before she started, and the books carry the evidence in their glossaries, maps and author’s notes.

What sets it apart is the politics. Elections, laws, debts, marriages and courtroom speeches get as much attention as battles, and McCullough shows how the Republic’s own rules were bent until they broke. Her Caesar is brilliant and attractive, and the series has been criticised for admiring him too much, but he is never simple.

The books are demanding. Each runs to many hundreds of pages, the cast is large, and the first volume asks the reader to learn how Roman politics worked. Readers who stay with it often call it the best fiction about Rome they have read.

Perfect for readers who love: political intrigue, long series with recurring characters, military campaigns, and detailed historical worlds.

Complete Reading Order for the Masters of Rome

The Thorn Birds

The Thorn Birds is a standalone, but it is the book McCullough is remembered for. It spans more than fifty years and follows the Cleary family on Drogheda, a sheep station so large it feels like a small country.

The novel is built around forbidden love, and it also gives a convincing picture of rural Australian life in the first half of the twentieth century: the heat, the isolation, the fires and the slow passing of generations. Its women carry the story, and its mothers and daughters repeat each other’s choices in ways the characters only half see.

Perfect for readers who love: multigenerational sagas, Australian settings, and stories of love and duty in conflict.

Awards and Recognition

McCullough’s honours came more from her standing in Australian life than from literary prizes.

Named one of Australia’s National Living Treasures by the National Trust of Australia (1997)
Honorary Doctor of Letters, Macquarie University (1993)
Officer of the Order of Australia (2006)
The Thorn Birds became an international bestseller and one of the best-known Australian novels ever written
Tim was adapted as a film in 1979, with Piper Laurie and Mel Gibson (IMDb)
The Thorn Birds was adapted as a television miniseries in 1983, with Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward (IMDb)

Legacy and Final Years

McCullough died on 29 January 2015 on Norfolk Island, and there will be no further novels. Her bibliography stands at 23 novels: seven Masters of Rome books, five Carmine Delmonico mysteries and eleven standalones.

Her Final Books

Bittersweet (2013) was her last novel, a return to the New South Wales country towns where she grew up. Sins of the Flesh, published the same year, closed the Carmine Delmonico series.

Reputation Today

During her lifetime McCullough was often treated by critics as a popular novelist first. Among historical fiction readers, her reputation now rests at least as much on the Masters of Rome, which remains one of the most recommended fiction series about the Roman Republic.

Her obituaries focused on The Thorn Birds, but readers of historical fiction mostly arrive through Rome. The series remains in print, and later novelists of the Roman Republic, such as Robert Harris and Steven Saylor, are often recommended to her readers and vice versa.

Similar Authors You’ll Enjoy

If you enjoy Colleen McCullough’s work, you might also like:

Robert Harris: His Cicero trilogy covers the same years as Caesar’s Women through The October Horse, seen from the side of Caesar’s opponents.
Steven Saylor: Crime novels set in the late Republic, with Cicero, Pompey and Caesar as recurring figures. A good bridge between her Roman books and her mysteries.
Conn Iggulden: His Emperor series tells Caesar’s life with more action and more freedom with the record.
Lindsey Davis: Rome a century later, in the Falco series. Lighter and funnier, with the same eye for daily life.
Madeline Miller: For readers who enjoyed The Song of Troy, Miller retells the Trojan War through Patroclus and Achilles.
Edward Rutherfurd: For readers who came for the scale of The Thorn Birds: sagas that follow families across generations and centuries.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Colleen McCullough’s best book?

The Thorn Birds is her most famous and best-selling novel. Among historical fiction readers, the Masters of Rome series is usually rated as her greatest achievement, with The First Man in Rome and The Grass Crown often singled out.

In what order should I read the Masters of Rome books?

Read them in publication order: The First Man in Rome, The Grass Crown, Fortune’s Favourites, Caesar’s Women, Caesar, The October Horse and Antony and Cleopatra. Publication order and chronological order are the same.

Do I need to read The Thorn Birds before her other books?

No. The Thorn Birds is a standalone novel and is not connected to any of her other books. You can start with any of her standalones or with the first book of either series.

Is the Masters of Rome series historically accurate?

It is one of the most carefully researched fiction series about Rome. McCullough followed the ancient sources closely, explained her choices in author’s notes and included glossaries and maps. Like any novelist she invented dialogue and private life, and some historians feel her portrait of Julius Caesar is too admiring.

What time periods did Colleen McCullough write about?

Her novels range from the Trojan War to the late Roman Republic, the convict era of Australia, Regency-era England, the colonial nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, the Second World War and the 1960s. One novel, A Creed for the Third Millennium, is set in the future.

Is Colleen McCullough still alive?

No. Colleen McCullough died on 29 January 2015 on Norfolk Island, aged 77. There will be no new books, and her bibliography is complete at 23 novels.

Are Colleen McCullough’s books suitable for young readers?

They are written for adults. The Thorn Birds and the Masters of Rome include sexual content and violence, and the Carmine Delmonico novels deal with serial murder. Mature teenage readers with an interest in Rome often manage the Masters of Rome, but parents may want to look first.

Has Colleen McCullough’s work been adapted for TV or film?

Yes. The Thorn Birds became a hugely popular television miniseries in 1983, starring Richard Chamberlain and Rachel Ward, followed by The Thorn Birds: The Missing Years in 1996. Tim was filmed in 1979 with Mel Gibson and Piper Laurie, and An Indecent Obsession was filmed in 1985. The Masters of Rome has not been adapted.

What is the Carmine Delmonico series?

It is a five-book crime series set in Holloman, a fictional Connecticut city modelled on New Haven, in the second half of the 1960s. Detective Carmine Delmonico investigates murders connected to Chubb University, which is modelled on Yale, where McCullough worked as a scientist.

How long are the Masters of Rome books?

They are very long. Most volumes run to well over 600 pages in paperback, and the full series is one of the longest in historical fiction. Many readers take it in stages, with breaks between books.

Did Colleen McCullough write a sequel to Pride and Prejudice?

Yes. The Independence of Miss Mary Bennet (2008) is set about twenty years after Pride and Prejudice and follows Mary, the middle Bennet sister. It is her own take on Austen’s characters rather than an imitation of Austen’s style.

Where should I start with Colleen McCullough?

Start with The Thorn Birds if you want her best-known book, or with The First Man in Rome if you want her Roman series. For a shorter first taste, try The Ladies of Missalonghi.

Conclusion

Colleen McCullough had two literary careers that most writers would envy one of. The Thorn Birds made her one of the most widely read Australian novelists of the twentieth century, and the Masters of Rome gave historical fiction one of its most complete portraits of a political world.

She wrote with the confidence of someone who had already succeeded in another field, and she never stayed in one genre for long. Her work rewards readers who like big books, real history and characters who want power.

Ready to start your Colleen McCullough reading journey? Begin with The Thorn Birds, or start the Masters of Rome with The First Man in Rome and our complete Masters of Rome reading order.