Sun Walks Down

In September 1883, the South Australian town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the whole town is intent on finding him. As they search the desert and mountains for the lost child, the residents of Fairly – newlyweds, landowners, farmers, mothers, artists, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen – explore their own relationships with the complex landscape unsettling history of the Flinders Ranges.

The colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is unfamiliar, multicultural, and noisy with opinions, arguments, longings and terrors. It’s haunted by many gods – the sun among them, rising and falling on each day that Denny could be found, or lost forever.

Praise for Fiona McFarlane

‘The Sun Walks Down is the book I’m always longing to find: brilliant, fresh and compulsively readable. It is marvellous. I loved it from start to finish.’ Ann Patchett, author of These Precious Days

‘Gorgeous storytelling and superb characters are among the glories of The Sun Walks Down. Fiona McFarlane is an extraordinary writer, one of the best working today. Her magnificent reworking of the lost child story showcases the profound understanding she brings to people, places and the past. I lived in this wise, majestic novel for days and never wanted it to end.’ Michelle de Kretser, dual Miles Franklin-winning author of Scary Monsters

‘Accomplished, assured, elegant and insightful – this beautifully told novel took me on the most unexpected and compelling of journeys. I adored it.’ Sofie Laguna, Miles Franklin-winning author of Infinite Splendours

‘The Sun Walks Down is an extraordinary work of fiction that I have no doubt will become a classic of Australian literature. McFarlane’s writing is assured, masterful, nothing short of brilliant.’ Emily Bitto, Stella Prize-winning author of The Strays and Wild Abandon

‘Symphonic in composition, The Sun Walks Down assembles an entire world around the disappearance of a young boy into the South Australian dust. Patiently, subtly, and with great-hearted humanity, Fiona McFarlane gives full life to every character in this world, remaking colonial myths with a 21st-century novelist’s tools. As the parts come together towards a moving climax, you find yourself immersed in something vast, satisfying on every level, a triumph of literary construction. With The Night Guest, McFarlane emerged as a major Australian literary novelist; The Sun Walks Down confirms it.’ Malcolm Knox, author of Bluebird

‘MacFarlane’s great gifts as a storyteller are on full display in this luminous and assured novel. Its extraordinary characters are at once revealed and shadowed by loss and by history, and by their fears for a child missing in a parched place few can read or know. All are infused – adults, children and the landscape they walk and search – with a complexity and dignity that is her hallmark. I closed the book and wanted immediately to read it again.’ Kristina Olsson, author of Boy, Lost

‘The Sun Walks Down by Fiona MacFarlane is, quite simply, the best novel I’ve ever read about 19th-century Australia. A tense search for a lost child unfolds with rising dread against a landscape of harsh and radiant beauty, amid lives as tangled as barbed wire.’ Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Horse

‘An extraordinary book. It is deeply disturbing and beautifully written – full of joy and melancholy. A rapturous, fearsome fable of grief and love. I willingly accept that I will be haunted by it beauty and its truths for a long time to come.’ Susanna Moore on The Night Guest

‘The Night Guest is such an accomplished and polished debut. A delicacy and poignancy to the writing is combined with almost unbearable suspense.’ Kate Atkinson

‘Astonishingly brilliant…Such a very rare voice.’ Evie Wyld on The Night Guest

‘An extraordinary novel. At once a tender thriller and an exquisitely constructed meditation on time and memory. With The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane announces herself as a writer to be read, admired, and read again.’ Kevin Powers

‘Sometimes a debut novel burns brighter than the rest, and offers up the promise of literary greatness. The Night Guest is one of these books.’ LA Review of Books

‘A debut of uncommon assurance…It seems to rise above the shiny trivia of the last decade’s novels…and do what serious fiction can: leave you more interested in the world, more conscious of its enigmas of love and memory, than you were before you read it.’ Chicago Tribune

‘An enrapturing debut novel . . . Startling and elegant.’ Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

‘Rich and suspenseful . . . [The Night Guest] is at once a beautifully imagined portrait of isolation and an unsettling psychological thriller.’ Publishers Weekly (starred review)

‘I have read the opening paragraph of Fiona McFarlane’s debut novel three times now–at first, slowly; but then with increasing, heart-pounding speed each time–and I am convinced it’s one of the most enticing openings to a novel I’ve read all year.’ David Abrams, The Quivering Pen

Format: Paperback
Pages: 416
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Publication date: 02/07/2024