Feb 15

Feb 15 The Sun Walks Down

Author: Fiona McFarlane
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

Click above to buy this book from my Bookshop.org shop, which supports independent bookstores (not Amazon). You can also find it via your favorite indie bookstore here.

Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

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.

TL;DR Review

The Sun Walks Down is a super atmospheric, polyphonic novel set in 1800s Australia about a boy lost in the desert and how the members of his town respond. I liked it a lot.

For you if: You like books where the setting becomes a character in and of itself.

Full Review

Thank you to FSG for the review copy of this book! Its awesome blurbs (and the fact that FSG put so much detail/budget into the ARCs) convinced me to pick it up, and I really enjoyed it.

The Sun Walks Down is interesting because it’s one of those books where the setting is the main character. It’s told through the voices of probably a dozen different members of a late-1800s colonial town in South Australia after a young, neurodivergent boy named Denny goes missing. That includes his family (I think his badass and queer-coded sister, Cissy, was my favorite), but also the police constable’s new wife, a painter visiting the area, Denny himself, and more. The story looks at not just how the community responds to the crisis, but also racism, colonization, class, and more.

One thing to know going in is that this is a slower-paced book and asks for your patience. The 7-day structure moves the story forward, not the prose — that lingers with the members of the town. So if you’re primarily interested in books where you’re invested in individual characters, this may not be for you. That said, it does what it’s trying to do very well.

Finally, I also listened to this one on audio as I read along, and thought it was performed very well. It had me entranced behind the wheel of my car a few times!