The Ladies Of Missalonghi/Tim: Colleen McCullough

The Ladies of Missalonghi: Missy Hurlingford is a poor, plain spinster and she's sick of her life. She's tired of being plain, poor, pitied and most of all, having to wear brown. Then she finds a new friend, Una, whose radical and rebellious ideas begin to work a change in Missy and in the lives of her mother and aunt until they, and the other genteel and poor ladies of the Hurlingford family set out for revenge against the men of the Hurlingford clan who have kept them down and poor. Set in the Blue Mountains in the imaginary town of Byron in the early 1900s.

Tim: Mary Horton is content with her comfortable, solitary existence... until she meets Tim - a beautiful young man with the mind of a child; a gentle outcast in a cruel, unbending world. Tim, in his own special and wonder-filled way, illuminates the darkness of Mary's days with his boyish innocence. And he will shatter the lonely, middle-aged spinster's respectable, ordered life with a forbidden promise of a very special love.