The Sun Walks Down
A Novel
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Short-Listed for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction
Named a Top 10 Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal
Named a Best Book of the Year by Kirkus and Chicago Public Library
“The Sun Walks Down is the book I’m always longing to find: brilliant, fresh, and compulsively readable. It is marvelous. I loved it start to finish.” —Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House
Fiona McFarlane’s blazingly brilliant new novel, The Sun Walks Down, tells the many-voiced, many-sided story of a boy lost in colonial Australia.
In September 1883, a small town in the South Australian outback huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the entire community is caught up in the search for him. As they scour the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly—newlyweds, farmers, mothers, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, artists, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen—confront their relationships, both with one another and with the landscape they inhabit.
The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is noisy with opinions, arguments, longings, and terrors. It’s haunted by many gods—the sun among them, rising and falling on each day in which Denny could be found, or lost forever.
Told in many ways and by many voices, Fiona McFarlane’s new novel pulses with love, art, and the unbearable divine. It arrives like a vision, mythic and bright with meaning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In McFarlane's expansive latest (after The High Places), the search for a missing boy in the Australian outback in 1883 casts lights on the tensions roiling beneath the surface of the English colony. One day, six-year-old Denny Wallace goes for a walk and disappears into a dust storm. Members of the small farming community help Denny's parents, Mathew and Mary, look for their son. Among the teeming cast are Minna Baumann, a newlywed who pines for her constable husband, Robert, after he joins the search party; Mr. Daniels, the sickly local vicar who is suspected of knowing what happened to Danny; Karl and Bess Rapp, itinerant artists who have come to paint the desert sunset; Cissy Wallace, one of Denny's five sisters, who has her sexual awakening as a result of the search; and Jimmy Possum, an Aboriginal tracker whose talismanic cloak is coveted by Mrs. Axam, the community's matriarch. But will their combined efforts lead to Denny's ultimate rescue? Though there isn't much of a plot, the vivid descriptions of the landscape, a lived-in feeling community, dozens of well-defined characters, and an honest look at the uneasy relationship between settlers and Australia's Indigenous population carry the reader along. Fans of Richard Flanagan and Peter Carey will love this.
