Tim is a simple, effective first novel by Colleen McCullough whose native Australia serves as the book's setting.

The novel is direct rather than subtle. It tells a gentle, spare story of a growing relationship and a mutual awakening of Mary Horton, a 45-year-old spinster who has never paid any attention to her own emotional needs in her climb from orphanhood to financial success, and Tim Melville, a strikingly beautiful, 25-year-old, mentally retarded boy whose innocence and gentleness are still intact.

Well into the novel, a specialist in the problems of the retarded voices what might be the book's central thrust: "Not one of us is born without something beautiful and something undesirable in us."…

Tim is a manual laborer "without the full quid," who catches Mary's eye and unsettles her world….

Each of the two people become the center of the other's life, partly because of their...