The sun, a ball of burning orange, dominates like a powerful, all-seeing deity in this masterful tale of a how the disappearance of a young boy, lost on the great Flinders Ranges, tests a community.
It is September 1883 and in the melting pot of cultures rubbing along in the South Australian country town of Fairly, there is a low hum of disquiet.
As the tale opens a vast dust storm kicks off, creating a shroud of gritty red. Minna Baumann is getting married to Constable Robert Manning when the rush of ruddy dirt comes through and six-year-old Denny, the youngest son of a local family, is out in the fields while his sisters attend the nuptials. When the wind calms he is gone.
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The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane, Allen & Unwin. PRE-ORDER HERE
(Credit: (Image: Booktopia))
As the town scrambles to search for the lad, every character has a story – from the Indigenous trackers to the Afghani cameleers, the shearers, schoolteachers, landowners and the pathetic local vicar.
The hours tick over into days and Denny’s mother becomes increasingly distraught as her family and the local officials head off into the traditional ranges that surround the comparatively recent farming settlement in pursuit of much-loved Denny.
Newcomers – a Swedish artist with a charm we soon mistrust and his English wife – are also out there somewhere trying to capture the magic of a landscape they barely understand. In Swedish the sun doesn’t set, “it walks down”.
Author Fiona McFarlane says she was “inspired by the disquieting beauty of the Flinders Ranges, which is littered with the stone ruins of the colonial farms and towns that failed to thrive there in the late 19th century.
“I found the landscape extremely unsettling, and was struck by the appropriateness of that word: I was encountering a place with a long history of unsettlement, beginning with the violent dispossession of the land’s traditional owners.”
Author Fiona McFarlane says she was “inspired by the disquieting beauty of the Flinders Range.
(Credit: (Image: Yanina Gotsulsky))Fiona’s engrossing tale is drenched in that eerie landscape and pulsates with drama not just for finding Denny but for the rich seam of subplots bubbling as colonialism treads its own treacherous path.
“My novel doesn’t set out to tell one authoritative story about the past: it’s full of the many people and voices that make up our history.”
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About the author
Fiona McFarlane was born and raised in the St George region of Sydney where her childhood was “a long garden full of jacarandas and frangipani, and a warm house full of books”.
She wrote her first novel aged six. “My mum typed it up and ‘published’ it for me by stapling it into a manilla folder,” she recalls. “I’ve always told stories as a way of making sense of the world.”
Her 2014 debut, The Night Guest, was a global sensation. “That success made so much possible,” she says.
Fiona currently lives in San Francisco, teaching creative writing at the University of California.
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