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In celebration of Independent Bookstore Day, shop our limited-time sale on bestselling audiobooks from April 22nd-28th. Don’t miss out—purchases support Bookmarks!
Shop nowThe Sun Walks Down
A Novel
Narrator
Emma Jones
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Length
12 hours 57 minutes
Language
English
Bookseller recommendation
“A riveting read. I was grabbed by the landscape, the characters and the premise right off the bat. Set in South Australia in the 1880's, it's the story of a missing child and the varied crowd that searches for him amid the backdrop of the mountains and desert of the outback. I couldn't put it down. ”
— Andrea • Bookstore1Sarasota
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.
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.
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Reviews
Advance Praise
“The Sun Walks Down is a revelation. McFarlane places her lens first over the disappearance of a small boy in the Australian Outback and zooms out, weaving the stories of the people involved in the search for him into a tapestry as richly imagined and fully realized as anything I’ve read in recent memory. Her sentences fit together with the beauty of fine carpentry, and with them she’s constructed a novel that calls to my mind no less than Patrick White’s The Tree of Man. I can’t think of another writer working today who I admire more.”
—Kevin Powers, author of The Yellow Birds
“This tale of a farming community’s search for a missing child offers intimate human drama, ruminations on the intersections of art and life, and a sweeping, still relevant view of race and class in Australia . . . A masterpiece of riveting storytelling.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The Sun Walks Down is a brilliant, intimate epic, a book about a family and also about history that is full of heart and heat. Fiona McFarlane's ear for the gurgles and clamor and hidden symphonies of her characters’ souls is flawless; the way their lives intertwine is propulsive, heartbreaking. She is, simply, one of the best writers around.”
—Elizabeth McCracken, author of The Souvenir Museum and Bowlaway
“Fiona McFarlane’s last book was scintillating. The Sun Walks Down is even better. It’s compelling: old-fashioned in all the best ways, historically sensitive, generous in storytelling and yet modern and sharp.”
—Sarah Moss, author of The Fell
“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
“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, author of The Hamilton Case
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