The Sun Walks Down: A Novel

Written by Fiona McFarlane

Narrated by Emma Jones

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Audiobooks of 2023

"Such a large cast of characters would normally be difficult to keep straight in an audiobook without tedious backtracking, but McFarlane’s skill in evoking their distinct inner lives and Jones’s deftness in capturing them in manner and accent keep them perfectly distinct." —The Washington Post

“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

"Listeners learn as much about the searchers and their inner lives as they do about the missing child. Each person--including farmers, cameleers, policemen, Indigenous trackers, and more--is examined with precision and telling details."- AudioFile

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, vivid, and bright with meaning.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781250892058

Fiona McFarlane

Fiona McFarlane is the author of The Night Guest; The High Places, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize; and The Sun Walks Down. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker and Zoetrope: All-Story. She teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews for The Sun Walks Down

[Lesley Donovan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I just finished this book and am so filled with many, deep emotions that it’s difficult to describe the experience of reading it. I can say that the author should at least be nominated for the Booker
prize and many others. It feels to me like a masterpiece. The worlds of children, so different from each other, the complex connections or lack of them within families, the sense of reality in nineteenth
century Australia that is almost unearthly…all play a huge role in the full experience of reading this book. The inner reality of people who will never connect with others for a variety of reasons is very finely drawn. Reading of the intense feelings that parents and children have for each other in loving families filled me with an ache while the little boy was missing. The experiences of the native
people are gently and sensitively depicted as well as the things that cannot be said.
I “read” this book by listening to it and can say that the narrator did full justice to the beautifully written experiences of the various characters and to Australia itself.