The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane
About Fiona McFarlane
Fiona McFarlane is the author of the novel The Night Guest, which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and a collection of short stories, The High Places, which won the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Her short fiction has been published in the New Yorker, Best Australian Stories and Zoetrope: All-Story. Born in Sydney, Fiona teaches creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley. For further information, visit:
A Quote from Fiona McFarlane
“I’m honoured to have been longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize, in the excellent company of all the other nominees. The Sun Walks Down is both a love letter to and a critique of Australian historical fiction, and I think that’s a reflection of all the messy and multiple ways our understanding of the present can arise out of readings and misreadings of the past. Novels, as a form, are also messy and multiple, so they seem particularly well suited to exploring the stories we tell ourselves about what we were, are, and could be.”
About The 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.
