In a novel of sweeping narrative power unequaled since her worldwide bestseller The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough returns to Australia -- this time with the story of its birth.

Richard Morgan, son of a Bristol tavern-keeper, is a contented man -- happily married, with a child he adores. His idyll crumbles when he finds himself led into an ambiguous relationship with a beautiful young woman, whose dissolute protector seeks vengeance on Morgan to protect his own skin.

Morgan endures the agonies of bereavement and financial loss, incarceration in prison and consignment as a convict to the famous "First Fleet" headed for the continent that Captain Cook had discovered only a few years earlier. Aboard the notorious "hulks," Morgan suffers the horrors of the journey to Botany Bay, where he finds a new love and a new life.

Morgan's Run is great fiction, full of drama, passion, history, love, and hatred, full-blooded and totally engrossing,taking us into a world we know little about, a stunning work that is at once rich entertainment -- and a revelation.