Life is pretty tough right now for twelve-year-old Eli - what with his mute brother, a convicted murderer for a babysitter, a drug-dealing stepfather, an incarcerated mother and a long-lost father - surely it can't get any worse? Think again...

Late in the night, fourteen-year-old Sam Watson steps onto a quiet overpass, climbs over the rail and looks down at the road far below. At the other end of the same bridge, an old man, Vic, smokes his last cigarette. The two see each other across the void. A fateful connection is made, and an unlikely friendship blooms.

The Thorn Birds is a robust, romantic saga of a singular family, the Clearys. It begins in the early part of this century, when Paddy Cleary moves his wife, Fiona, and their seven children to Drogheda; and it ends more than half a century later.

This family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between. Struggling to rebuild their lives after being touched by disaster, the Pickle family, who've inherited a big house in Perth, take in the God-fearing Lambs as tenants. From 1944 to 1964, the shared experiences of the two clans bond them to each other and to the bustling, haunted house in ways no one could have anticipated.