I had to chew on this one for about a week to decide what I had to say about this book and brilliant is sorely inadequate.
Fiona McFarlane’s story is on the surface a story about lost boy that a colonial Australian community comes together to try and find. There are so many characters with opinions and views on the situation but also on their own situations and lives. The cast of characters range from Aboriginals, policemen, married couples, Artist and many more that you would think the story line of the missing boy would get lost but McFarlane’s writing is spot on meshing art, myth and relationships to tell the community’s views on race and class all while the many different characters search for a 6 year old boy lost drying a dust storm.
I couldn’t put it down and devoured it almost in a sitting!
So many different topics for Bookclubs to discuss , so this book would make an excellent bookclub pick! Five star read for me!
Thank you NetGalley for the free digital E-read copy to review. My opinions are my own and I have not been paid for this review.

I thought this was a great read. The amount of information and detail you get is all encompassing and beautifully written. Each character is complex and flawed and working through their own experience. It is up to the reader to decide how much they want to unpack with each. For example, the secondary (usually second-rate) characters usually had more of a character arc in their short chapters than the mains had over the course of the whole book. I took this to be more of a reflection on who they are as people rather than a fault of the author.

I look forward to reading more from Fiona MacFarlane.

I liked the atmosphere of this book a lot and I liked that it felt like more of a character study than a plot driven book, but I struggled a bit to connect to the writing. I also found it sometimes to drag along a little too much.

Overall I enjoyed this book and the story that it was telling, specifically all the imagery. But I just found myself unable to get into it or sympathize with any of the characters.

Wow. Set in Australia in the late 1800s, this novel is a masterclass in character development and urging the reader to think about their own identity and feelings of being lost and found and SEEN. What a history Australia has with Aboriginal life and rich culture juxtaposed with the white people who, brought by many circumstances, live there. This book is full of characters - complex, characters. I took notes when I was reading it because of not only the number of them but because their layers and interconnectedness deserved more attention than just attempting to remember details and intricacies. It’s stunning. I could feel the hot sun and dryness of the land. The tension - the colors - the characters - wow. Brilliant. Thanks to Farrar, Straus, and Giroux for the copy. What a gift.

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 14, 2023

In Swedish, the sun doesn’t set; it “walks down.” Or so says Karl Rapp, a Swedish painter who is believes the fierce sky in South Australia must be illuminated by a different sun. While a sunrise might be “the soft but sturdy pink of a cat’s paw” or the “glossy pink of Bess Rapp’s neck,” it is the deep demonic reds of the Australian sunset that inspire him.

The Sun Walks Down is set in South Australia. The plot unfolds during a week in 1883, although backstories offer a wealth of information about the history of the characters and the region.

A lost child is at the center of a wide-ranging story of gossip, judgment, fear, mistakes, mundane life, and discrimination against indigenous people. The child, Denny, is one of seven children of Mary and Mathew Wallace. Denny becomes lost when he is sent to gather kindling as a windstorm arrives on the wedding day of Robert Manning and Minna Baumann. The dust is blowing with such force that Minna's father brings a pony into the church during the wedding. Shearers are about to arrive at the stations, an inopportune time for a child to disappear.

Robert, a local constable, organizes a search for Denny. Denny’s sister Cecily insists on joining Robert's search. Matthew conducts his own search with the help of Billy Rough, the indigenous employee who lets him win their nightly fistfights. Sergeant Foster from the Port Augusta police brings two indigenous trackers, despite his dislike of “blackfellows.”

Denny is afraid during his trek through the desert, but his fears are driven by myths and Bible stories, not by an encounter with a malicious person. Suspicions of foul play are nevertheless fueled by a bloody handkerchief, the light of a distant fire at night, and the recovery of the child’s boots. Nearly everyone is viewed with suspicion, particularly indigenous men, but even Denny’s mother and the local vicar are on Foster’s radar.

While Denny’s disappearance is the adhesive that joins the characters together, most of the novel explores the complexity of their simple lives. Fiona McFarlane explains why Karl and his wife Bess decided to leave Sweden and the ironic erosion of Karl’s trust in Bess. McFarlane traces the history of the Baumann family before and after it planted roots in Australia. She presents Minna as a desire-driven woman to whom the fidelity of marriage will clearly be a challenge, a woman who hoped that marriage would liberate her from her mother’s moods. Minna enjoyed kissing Karl shortly before (and again after) she married Robert, but believes the pleasure she derives from other men is proof of her love for Robert.

McFarlane portrays Cecily as a young woman at a crossroads, faced with the possibility of doing something special with her life or trading an education for the meager but secure income of manual labor. Cecily wants to “burn with one true and important idea” but doesn’t want to choose an idea; she wants the idea to choose her. Cecily’s teacher advises her that women like Cecily “don’t wait for our hearts to decide anything for us. We don’t fall in love — we stride into it. We choose.” Cecily believes herself to be in love with Robert and perhaps with all men of a certain type.

Lesser characters weave into the story, playing important if tangential roles. A man with a camel from Pashtun has a telling conversation with Minna about the local German prostitute, famously known for draping a blanket over her donkey when her services are engaged. The vicar joins the search for Denny, or perhaps he just wants to be by himself.

Billy Rough learned the game of cricket and excels at bowling but his skin color kept him from playing outside of South Australia. Tal, the best tracker among local the indigenous people, turns out to be the novel’s most sensible character. Ralph “Bear” Axam believes himself to be in love with Minna, perhaps because she is newly married and therefore safe to love. Even the novel’s dogs are given distinct personalities.

Denny’s story is not meant to be dramatic — to most characters, his disappearance is a nuisance that distracts from the serious work of eking out a living in an unforgiving land — but its resolution is satisfying. The novel’s beauty lies in its details. Bullocks and wallabies witness human folly. The possum-fur coat worn by a tracker with an injured arm is coveted by a white woman who hides her own injured arm in a shawl that lacks the same mystical qualities. A burning tree, set afire to guide Denny home, inspires the religious fervor of a burning bush. Denny’s grandfather, a man who “keeps a vigilant watch on his bowel movements” and would “prefer to hear no more than one new piece of information a day,” devotes himself to ineffectual prayer when he learns of Denny’s disappearance. Foster’s ruminations about “true pioneers” illustrate the inflated self-importance of those who mistake humility for weakness.

McFarlane creates a convincing world that exists in a time and place distant from our own, yet her characters could live in any place at any time. Their varying responses to a moment of crisis in a frontier community make The Sun Walks Down a remarkable novel.

RECOMMENDED

Thank you to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and NetGalley for an early copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

This novel wasn't exactly what I thought it was going to be but I really did enjoy it. I liked the width and breadth of the characters and the parts of the story that was told here -- the disappearance of the boy was central to the story, obviously, but I also think that the other stories were almost more interesting. I wanted more of his mother and his sisters, I wanted more about the school teacher and I wanted more about the Indigenous people involved in the story. I think it was a great window into this place and this time that I otherwise know nothing about.

3.5 stars.

Ohh. This novel! My love affair is multi-faceted: the beautiful, evocative language; the Australian desert setting so reminiscent of my Sonoran desert home; the deep dive into rich and complicated characters; the nods to artistry and creative pursuits; the respect of the natural world; the symbolism and thematic messages!

While this is a book that takes place over seven days (compact time periods are not generally my favored set-up), it actually reaches back in time, well before the 1883 ‘event’ in the book – through flashbacks of multiple characters in this small desert community, making it a rich and nuanced reading experience.

Even with this depth, there is tension and excellent pacing (and several surprises) that had me flipping pages from start to finish.

McFarlane is a gifted writer, taking her readers on a journey through time and geography, and offering expert description of characters:

Cissy might be capable of standing at the gate and hauling the whole plain in like a net. Trees and fences will come with it, flocks of sheep, the wheat paddocks, the railway, and also Denny – Cissy will catch him up and bring him in.

[Another description of Cissy] … Mary watches Cissy walk onto the plain. She seems to sail over the thorny ground, with nothing to stop her step or catch her skirt. It’s as if there’s nothing there but Cissy – no plants or rocks or flies, no sun or temperature at all, and Mary is proud to have made this girl, this daughter, who will find Denny and bring him home.

… the country flattens, and all along the road out to the Wallace place you can see the surprising hill beside their house. The way it erupts from the flatness of the plain seems so unlikely, as if some tired prophet passed by once and God made a hill to give him shade.

The animals look out at Bear from lowered lids. Because they require nothing from him, not food or water, not pity or affection, he feels judged by them.

[From a character who is an artist]: The reds here are simply unimaginable, dumbfounding, the purest I have seen, as if fire itself has caught fire. Not to mention the deep purples, which are almost poisonous – when the sky turns red, the hills look bruised…. The sky pulls the land up to it. It involves the land. How to get this feeling out and onto paper?

I absolutely fell in love with the characters – little Denny, Mary and Mathew – and especially fiery Cissy – but also the Rapps, the Axams and the libidinous Minna. This novel offers a peek into the complicated lives of all the inhabitants of the town – and the ways their prejudices, desires, and religious/spiritual beliefs shape their lives and interactions with one another.

Through the lens of one exacting moment that brings together and divides a community, the author explores themes ranging from settler colonialism and its horrendous impact on native Aboriginal Australians to women’s roles during the 1800s in Australia. The novel is an examination of what humans do when nature is a formidable foe and touches on the role of art in the painting of history (both canvas and literary art).

I will be buying a print copy of this incredible literary book and so look forward to this author's future work! Many thanks to Net Galley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

This didn’t meet my high expectations and that is partly due to myself. I realise that these first months of 2023 I crave books that feel urgent, with lots of facts and content. I had hoped to learn about the colonisation of Australia as this book is set in the mid-1800s in Australia’s interior.

This is much more ‘emotion-based’ though and I had a very hard time to get invested in the characters. There were also too many of them and it felt like at page 200 we were still busy introducing the 12th new character. But ok, I can definitely see this work for many and even for myself in the future – the writing is good, the natural setting and atmosphere are beautiful.

Delighted to include this title in the February edition of Novel Encounters, my regular column highlighting the month’s most anticipated fiction, for the Books section of Zoomer magazine. (see column and mini-review at link)

A totally page-turning novel told in a number of different voices, taking place in the Australian outback in 1883 when a young boy gets lost. There are the boy’s parents, indigenous trackers, two wealthy families, a Swedish artist and his female artist partner among others. We also hear from Danny, the little boy as he wanders the outback alone. McFarlane makes us feel the sun burning our skin as the dust coats us.

Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Net Galley for an advance copy of this dazzling novel. Set in South Australia in 1883, Fiona McFarlane’s story spans 7 days and revolves around the search for Denny Wallace, a six year old boy who disappears as he tries to make his way home during a dust storm. Although the premise would suggest a mystery or thriller — indeed, one of the searchers, Sergeant Foster of Port Augusta, declares that Denny has been abducted — the novel is a character study of the various denizens of the rural community of Fairly. The novel opens with the wedding of the lusty teen Minna Baumann to Constable Robert Manning which Denny’s five sisters attend. Denny’s mother, Mary, who had lost most of her family on the voyage to South Australia and was raised by her strict father, a clergyman, who was convinced that no one would marry his deaf daughter, remains at home. When Denny fails to return, Mary tries to allay her concerns by supposing that Denny had fallen fast asleep or had found his father and they would be returning together, but then she worries about snake bites, steep gullies, and strangers in the desert.

From this emotional beginning where the reader experiences a mother’s distress over a missing child, the novel becomes a polyphonic tale which reflects how the members of this community respond to a crisis, to each other, and to the land that shapes them. The plot is not the point of McFarlane’s novel; rather, she focuses her novel on the closely observed relationships among the townspeople who help the Wallaces look for their son and whose sympathy “curdled” at the possibility that the Wallaces may have had a hand in Denny’s disappearance and were sending searchers out to cover their own tracks. McFarlane deploys Denny’s disappearance as a plot device to explore her themes, such as the fraught relationship between white people and Australia’s native Aboriginal people. She writes of Jimmy Possum, a native tracker, who is derided by Sergeant Foster for his supposed vanity, but whom the reader learns was left uncompensated for his prior work uncovering an arsonist. In a letter to the editor of the local newspaper decrying Jimmy’s treatment, the writer implores that “any white man ought to stir himself to be a champion for Aborigines of good character.”

With magnificent prose, McFarlane introduces us to dozens of well-defined characters – the newlyweds, farmers, Afghan cameleers, artists, widows, and prostitutes – while offering a portrait of the uneasy relationship between white settlers and Australia’s Indigenous population. She creates a sweeping, lyrical portrait of the small town idiosyncrasies, family histories and the brutal natural landscape.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. In 1883 in a small town in South Australia, the town Fairly is bustling as a young local woman marries a young local policeman and groups of men enter the town right ahead of sheep shearing season. Amid all this, a small boy wanders off on his own and gets lost due to a sandstorm. The town organizes various search parties and goes out looking for the boy. This wonderful book is told, bit by bit, day by day, by over a dozen people. The newlyweds, the mother, father and children of the lost boy, various neighbors, a prostitute who travels with a donkey, a Swiss painter and his English wife who are passing through, an ineffectual vicar and even the missing boy himself. A very human story told on a vast canvas.

I didn't like this book as well as I thought I would. At times, it was confusing, and started out rather slow. Then a little boy goes missing, and the rest of the time they, his family and friends were looking for him. I did like the Aboriginal legends and culture that was used in this novel. All in all, it was an interesting book but it moved rather slow.

Tell me a book is “Historical Fiction,” and I guarantee you 1 of 2 things: It’s set during WWII, and/or the misty-colored cover features a woman in a dress or long coat facing away from the viewer. Not my go-to genre, but I still try them hoping to be pleasantly surprised. SUN was unique.

THE SUN WALKS DOWN tells the many-voiced, many-sided story of a boy lost in colonial Australia. The writing is lovely (“The sunrise this morning is the soft but sturdy pink of a cat’s paw”), and the descriptions of the many (many!) characters were insightful and witty.

“Minna is eighteen and ready for the world to be larger than her mother’s house— but not too much larger.”

“Cissy will feel, talking to Mrs. Daly, that she’s a pail in which there is a tiny hole, and through that hole the best of her will trickle out, unnoticed.”

It was an atmospheric but ultimately forgettable character study with too many characters. While each was fascinating, there were too many vying for my attention. It was a series of delicious appetizers with no main course.

Thank you, NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for a digital review copy.

The plot is intriguing enough to keep the reader interested. The characters are a bit sterotypical, though, and the descriptions are a bit repetitious. But overall, this is a good read.

The book uses the disappearance of a 6 year old boy as a foil to unravel (and ravel) the different anthropological groups that make up the late 1800s in the South Australian outback. There is the Western Europeans, Germans, Swedes, native Australians, and indigenous peoples. Each group is set against the backdrop of the Outback and its weather. The many voices, many sided stories sometimes get lost in the telling of their stories. The transitions, at times, can be abrupt and hard to follow. An enjoyable read, but drawn out.

A young boy is lost in the harsh landscape of 1880s Northern Australia and his community comes together to search for him.

I really love kaleidoscopic novels like this, that tell everyone's story around a central plot element. In this case - the disappearance of young Denny in the Australian bush reveals not only the story of his family, but everyone in the town. The newlywed Mina and her constable husband. European painters searching for inspiration. We get to see everyone. I listened to this, and the narrator was lovely.

(4.5 stars) The Sun Walks Down is a beautifully written story based in and near a small town in the South Australian desert which has recently seen vivid sunsets of a startling red (the so-called Sun “walking down”). When 6-year-old Denny gets lost in a dust storm – he was sent by his mother to collect kindling – the community rallies to look for him. This includes his father, his sister, friends, the constable and a slew of native trackers. The story is told from several points of view, including Denny’s own (thank goodness…I was stressed not knowing what had befallen the kid). The various members of the community have their own stories to tell and McFarlane does them all justice. I was thoroughly captured by the story and its characters, from Denny’s hearing-impaired mother to his 5 sisters to the skilled Aboriginal trackers, one of which wears a poncho of sewn-together possum skins to hide his injured arm. As with many Australian novels, the land itself is a character in this book and descriptions of its flora and fauna are among the best passages. This is arguably the best book I have read that is set in Australia and that says a lot because I’ve read some of Tim Winton’s books and he’s good. Highly recommended.

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for providing me with an e-ARC of this title.

This is a book to be savored. While the Australian landscape may seem sparse to some, McFarlane's writing makes it come alive—saturated with orange, yellow, and, most importantly, blinding, fiery red. This warmth imbues a story about loss, after a young boy wanders off in a dust storm. The small community comes together to search for him, but also to wonder at their own fortune amidst the struggles of the everyday. The story wanders from townsperson to townsperson, picking up and dropping narratives as McFarlane sees fit. And it works—this patchworks story paints an all-seeing portrait of a small community and the magical journey of a boy on the cusp of understanding the world. This novel is at once mundane and otherworldly, and color saturates every page.

A superb work of historical fiction.