The Thorn Birds
The great Australian saga of forbidden love. Meggie and Father Ralph de Bricassart's decades-spanning impossible relationship unfolds against the brutal beauty of the Outback. McCullough understood that the most powerful romances are the ones where love can never be fully claimed, and she built a world worthy of that tragedy.
The Ralph-and-Meggie romance at the book's center is the sticking point that won't move for some readers: Ralph's attention to Meggie starts when she's a child, and a critic writes plainly, “He seems vaguely predatory,” regardless of how the book frames it later. Other reviewers call the prose itself the problem, one describing it as “long, unfocused, badly written, soaked in soap opera levels of melodrama,” closer to a doorstop romance than the literary saga its reputation suggests. Length draws its own complaints once the story leaves the Australian station setting, with a critic estimating it runs “about 200p or so too long.” Meggie herself gets criticized as thin, her arc narrowing to marriage and motherhood with little independent interior life given to her, while her brothers read as interchangeable and underwritten.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
