Nor was it prominent enough ten years ago, or even fifteen. Of course, I could have set Fairvale now and had the ladies reading The Thorn Birds – except The Thorn Birds is not a novel that is particularly fashionable now, so it didn’t seem likely that a modern book club would read it. I don’t know when my mother had read it but by the time I found it, the book’s legend was already large. If the book was in the house, it was fair game for me, so I had plucked The Thorn Birds from a shelf at eight years of age, thrilling to the things I could understand and ignoring what I couldn’t. My mother taught me to read and never censored my reading material. It certainly captured my attention when I first read it. This epic novel of forbidden love set against the forbidding Australian landscape swept all before it as Australian readers took it to heart and mind. However, when I thought about a book club set far from a city, deep in the heart of some of our wildest country, there was only one choice for the first book that the Fairvale ladies would read: The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, and because that book was published in 1977, it determined the era of my own novel. The Prince of Wales was still single and Lady Diana Spencer was seventeen years old. No change in the federal government – certainly no prime minister being sacked by a governor-general, as had happened not that long before. This is not because I have a particular affection for that year.

The story of The Inaugural Meeting of the Fairvale Ladies Book Club opens in 1978. Author Sophie Green’s novel THE INAUGURAL MEETING OF THE FAIRVALE LADIES BOOK CLUB completes the circle of her enduring love for epic Australian stories that reflect the stark grandeur of our landscape.

The thorn birds book 1977