"Fortune's Favorites" by Colleen McCullough, published by William Morrow & Co, New York, 1993. Stated First Edition, 1st printing with '1' present in the line on the copyright page; illustrated with maps and b/w drawings.

Original dust jacket with un-clipped price of $25.00 on the front flap; hard boards, maroon cloth spine, gold lettering on spine, 6.1/2" x 9.1/2"; front endpaper is a map; back endpaper is a chronological table; 878 pages, very good/ fine condition.

Book Three in the "Masters of Rome" series, focusing on the general Sulla and Pompey, the young scion of a powerful rural family: In the midst of a disintegrating Republic, the dictator of ancient Rome, Sulla, retires, the brutally ambitious Pompey appoints himself Magnus, and a young Caesar emerges as a towering figure to his people, with his wife, Cimilla, by his side...

Includes synopses of the events in the first two books. Illustrated by the author with 13 full-page, hand-drawn maps and 14 black and white illustrations of major figures in this epic historical novel. Includes an Author's afterword detailing sources and references, 70 page glossary of terms and Latin words.

"The books are interesting in many ways. One of them, is that they cover a period of Rome's history before (and overlapping with) the rise of Julius Cesar. Most histories of Rome basically start with Cesar and the fall of the Republic. That is not true in this case. The author covers the life of Gaius Marius, Sulla, and other who pre-date Cesar by decades. i learned a great deal from these books and commend the author for writing them." [a private review]

Colleen Margaretta McCullough AO [1937-2015] was an Australian author known for her novels, her most well-known being "The Thorn Birds" and "The Ladies of Missalonghi".

Following "The Thorn Birds", McCullough wrote her magnum opus: seven novels on the life and times of Julius Caesar, each a colossus weighing in at up to 1,000 pages. "The Masters of Rome" series preoccupied her for almost 30 years, from the early 1980s to the publication of the final volume in 2007. The research was a monumental task: a library of several thousand books and monographs on every aspect of Roman history and civilization accumulated on the shelves of her home. She drew maps of cities and battlefields, scoured the world’s museums for busts and inscriptions, consulted experts in a dozen universities and recorded every known fact about her subject and his times.

US: Priority (c.2-4 days) ---------- $12.50
Canada: Priority (c.2-6 weeks) ---- $32.50
World: Priority (c.2-8 weeks) ----- $48.50