In 'The Sun Walks Down' by Fiona McFarlane a young boy goes missing in the Australian outback. He is only six years old, and frightened by stories, legends and strong emotions that tell him the land is full of gods. The family are new settlers, along with many of the other people in the area. Men are called into search and no one wants to say that in the heat and sandy desert, it is unlikely the boy will survive.

McFarlane's writing style is polished, vivid and gripping. The story is told from many different perspectives, and along with loss, other themes are explored, including marginalisation, class, dislocation, the treatment of aboriginal people, marriage and belief. McFarlane's characterisation is also incredibly strong, and I loved the eccentricities all of the characters had. This book will appeal to people interested in historical fiction, or who like a location to be vividly brought to life. I would highly recommend.

The book was very well written about a 6 year old boy being lost in a storm and follows his story about surviving while out in the wilderness but also many other characters, their lives and the affect it had on them throughout the story.
However, the story jumped around too much and at times it was slow and drawn out and repetitive. It would have been better with fewer characters.

The dryness, dustiness and vastness of Southern Australia is so well described. Young Denny gets disorientated in a dust storm and the search for him introduces us to the characters who inhabit this sparsely populated part of Australia. The relationships between the settlers and the indigenous natives, the social divisions between the settlers themselves and those from the bigger towns are all examined.
So evocative of the life all the characters were living the story eventually became tedious and seemed to go for ever.

An unusual but fascinating read by Fiona McFarlane. Set in 1880s Australia, the pace reflects the way of life of a poor farming community, whose hard daily routine is disrupted by the loss of a very young boy in a dust storm. The whole community is shocked at the news and several of them rally round to search and also to support the family left behind. The story of the search is told from the different perspectives of officials, neighbours, travellers, family members, and of course from Denny himself. These weave in and out of the plot, telling the backgrounds of each one of them, forming a tapestry of life and culture in an Australian settler community at that time. The writing is spare, using the landscape and weather to heighten mood and suspense, and manages to beautifully express the tensions of race, class, aspiration and morality without mawkishness or sentimentality. After an achingly slow build-up to the story itself, a well-written and absorbing novel.

It's a fascinating and original choral story, a novel where we met a lot of characters, learn their story and their relationship with the world around them.
Not always easy to follow but riveting as the author is a talented storyteller.
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

A beautifully written, epic story. Deniston Wallace goes missing in a dust storm and the story follows not just his journey trying to get home but a whole cast of characters affected by his dissapearance. There are so many individual stories told as you read through the book, all subtly linked.
The Sun Walks Down will hook you in.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to read The Sun Walks Down.

I enjoyed the writing in this book and thought the author bought the landscape and difficulty of building a community in it vividly to life. I also thought the central premise of the young white boy who went missing was a good place to start looking at the other issues going on in the small town, and wider Australia. However, I did find it quite a slog to get through, and it felt a bit repetitive at times. I think the story would have worked just as well with fewer, more rounded characters.
Thank you to netgalley and Sceptre for an advance copy of this book

I really struggled to finish reading this book. The novel centres around the disappearance of a six year old boy in 1883 Australia. The story is told from the point of view of several characters, including the missing boy himself. The writing is beautiful and the descriptions of the bush are very evocative however for some reason I found the book a bit of a slog.

Thank you to Net Galley for an advanced copy of this book. Sadly I did not finish it, giving up at 35%. I was finding reading this book a chore and decided that life is too short to struggle through it when nothing was motivating me to go on. There were so many characters and it seemed quite disjointed. I hate giving up on a book but, sorry, I couldn’t face reading any more of this.

It’s 1883 in an isolated town in colonial Southern Australia. There is a dust storm and a six-year-old boy called Denny Wallace goes missing. His disappearance has ramifications not just for his close family, but for the wider community, including those who arrive to take part in the search and those who are just passing through. The historical setting is unfamiliar (to me at least) and Fiona McFarlane conjures it brilliantly. Her characters truly inhabit the arid, unforgiving landscape and she creates the tense, complex relationships within this world with immense skill. This is an unusual, powerful and extremely readable novel.

Set in September 1883, the Sun Walks Down spans a week in which a small white boy is lost in the desert, a week in which the skies over Southern Australia and much of the rest of the world, are stained a lurid red in the wake of the Krakatoa eruption. It’s some time before a search party is organised for Denny who’s wandered off into a dust storm.

McFarlane uses the disappearance of a white boy to explore themes of colonialism and white supremacy, switching perspectives across a wide range of characters, from the tracker estranged from his own culture when a white sheep farmer spots a potential cricketing star, to the Swedish painter, reliant on his wife’s practicality and tolerance of his philandering, to Denny’s sister, furious with almost everybody and everything, determined to make a future for herself. Each character has their backstory vividly told, building a portrait of this small settlement made prosperous by the construction of a railway. It’s a slow read, sprawling at times, kept afloat by the quality of Fiona McFarlane’s writing with its lightly mocking tone which was what kept me reading. That, and its setting, one which I know little about. Recommended, but with reservations.

Thank you for allowing me to review this book. The author is new to me. I was interested in this book as it was about early life in the Australian outback. To this end the book achieved this well, however I found the story lacked pace, some of the descriptions were to long winded for me. I completed the book as I was keen to know if Denny was found & the future update was a nice ending to the story. However, there were to many characters that for a long time felt superfluous to the subject.
If you don't mind slow stories with lots of descriptive language then you will enjoy this book.

Although this book was well written it really wasn't for me .It will probably appeal to some readers probably a different age group but sadly I found it hard to get into

Strange, alluring, elusive: avoiding all pigeon holes

Fiona McFarlane’s almost-inhabitation of a dream-time, is set upon the huge canvas of 1880s Southern Australia.

A small boy goes missing, lost in the outback, to be precise, the Flinders Ranges, now a National Park. Missing, vanishing children in the Australian Outback, are an established trope in literature and film. And of course, in real life.

McFarlane does something wonderful here. The missing child, Denny, of course comes from a family. The father is struggling to avoid mortgage foreclosure on his farm. The mother is deaf, the child has an intense connection with her. There are a whole passel of daughters, from a barely toddler to a daughter deep in the throes of her burgeoning womanly body. And a sharp, bright 15 year old, intelligent beyond the opportunities of her financial and class station, yearning for opportunity.

There are wealthier families, with status and a sense of entitlement.

There are white policemen, and their families, there are native employees, servants, on the land and in the houses of the colonialists.

And there are a couple of artists, a Swedish landscape painter and his wife, also an artist, children’s book illustrator and writer.

And then – there is the landscape, brooding, beautiful, implaceable. And the people, of different tribes, who have lived with her for centuries, who have a relationship and understanding with her, and whose lives and culture are being eroded by colonialist actions and attitudes.

The beauty of what McFarlane does is, she does not present us with graspable black and white heroes and villains. Instead, every character is complex, nuanced, riven by their own irreconcilables. Like all of us..

I can’t say I ever felt manipulated by McFarlane, where she wishes to make a point about right and wrong, she drops a small incident, a way of thought or action a character displays. A bit like a stone into still water, and sets off many, many ripples

I also loved the way that the book itself was also about the elusiveness of artistic creation. In some ways what I couldn’t quite grasp hold of is one of the strengths of the book – easy, pat answers, easy definitions are limited. So, Karl, the Swedish artist, trying and never quite managing to capture the extraordinary quality of sunset sky, the elusiveness, the attempt at pinning down what might be transcendent, beyond words, felt right, not just in what McFarlane was doing, but was also something about the difference in the way the transcendent was being viewed, experienced, ‘owned’ – and therefore limited, by the white settlers, and the different, shifting quality of that relationship for the indigenous people.

Some aspects of the whole story – including why the artist struggled so with his sunsets, why the child became lost in the first place, do not become fully clear and understandable until very near the end. A very satisfying conclusion. Including a beautiful coda some twenty years later.

I know this review is probably frustratingly rambling, but feel so strongly that the reader’s best journey must be through innocent bewilderment and some confusion – which is what is happening to the characters here.

I discovered that I read McFarlane’s first novel, nearly 10 years ago, which had felt unsatisfying. I am so very very pleased I requested this one, on digital ARC. A wonderful, highly recommended journey

Beautifully written novel that really encaptures the atmosphere, the environment and the community that pull together to search for the missing boy. Lots of subplots and characters which add depth and interest to the book. This was a difficult one for me, as although I really appreciated the beautiful language, the slow pace of the book meant it was a little frustrating. However, this is purely down to personal taste and others will love this.
Thankyou the NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Set in South Australia in 1883, a young boy gets lost in the desert. Over the next seven days and nights, the book follows a whole community as they look for him. His family on their small wheat property faced with drought include his mother and father and five sisters. There’s a large cast of characters and the book is so skilfully and beautifully written that it is easy to follow all their different personalities. The landscape is also a major part of the story including spectacular sunsets due to the massive volcanic eruption at Krakatoa. This was a brilliant read showing the full range of people in the colony.

Six-year-old Denny is lost in the expanse of colonial Australia. The community of Fairly set about finding him.

Quiet, beautiful writing which manages to distinguish each of the large cast of characters, while also treating a community as a character in its own right. Added to this is the landscape, the weather, the hardships of frontier life.

Ostensibly this is the story of Denny, a six year old boy who goes missing while out collecting firewood near the Flinders Range in southern Australia in 1883. In fact the the plot encompasses much more than this as it pulls in the whole community to help with the search for the child and such an difficult and emotional activity leaves more than one of them changed for life both physically and emotionally.
Denny's sisters were away at a wedding in town when he vanished and his father was working some distance from the homestead. When his father returns home he immediately sets out with his Aboriginal worker trying to track Denny's route. The local policeman is called in and then indigenous trackers. One of Denny's sisters, Cissy, is also involved in the search and at some point most of the townsfolk come to the homestead or make some contribution to plot. All this makes for a huge range of characters and various storylines that at some points pull the reader away from the main task - finding the missing child. The author comes back to Denny, time and time again, as the topography, the weather, and the fractious nature of the those looking for him threaten to make an unhappy ending, but some of the momentum of the plot is lost each time we look in on another searcher and it slows the narrative down.
Despite this the story held my attention and was easy to follow. I don't know the countryside at all but the descriptions were easy to understand and envisage. The hard fought existence of early settlers and their relationships with the Aboriginals makes for some unsettling reading, although I'm sure worse was probably true. There are fleeting references to Afghan camel drovers, gold prospectors and Chinese settlers too , all of whom have a few pages in the book.
In all the story has a breathtaking scope, perhaps a bit too wide, and the plot would have been more intense with less characters, but I enjoyed it, as a non Australian, as a sneak peak at that country's history and geography.
With thanks to Netgalley and Hodder & Stoughton for an early copy in exchange for an honest review. I would be happy to read more from this author.

Thanks to Sceptre and Netgalley for a review copy of this book. Complex and beautifully written with a unique voice, the novel is an examination of a small rural South Australian community in the late 19th century and the landscape around them. It’s told in a voice that is almost allegorical with a distant view that looks on, almost as if the landscape itself is viewing these characters and how they react to the disappearance of a six year-old boy, Denny, one afternoon while the local constable married a pretty young woman. For Denny, getting lost is a transformative occurrence, almost a vision quest, or an indigenous dreamtime for him as he relates to the landscape in a manner that only a young child can. His sister, beset with guilt, seeks him with a determination to be the hero. Their father, the people of the community, the indigenous trackers all have their own sense of what should happen and how, and are met with their own expectations of self and the landscape around them. The sun and all the gods of the dreaming time are part of that landscape and enter into this search.

It’s not always an easy book, the style and voice are unusual, at times engaging, and at times so at odds with the norm, but it is a voyage of understanding of a time period that was filled with more than just a white man’s voice. A novel of awards, for awards and one that should be recognised for the literary achievement it is.

McFarlane brings the Australian frontier to life in this multi-faceted historical novel, throwing her net wide over a huge cast of characters and drawing it together with intricate skill to reveal the impact of the missing boy on their lives and desires – past, present and future. Gripping. 4.5 stars.