The Sun Walks Down
by Fiona McFarlane
☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction
In The Sun Walks Down, a historical novel set in 1883 Australia, the disappearance of a six-year-old boy during a duststorm electrifies an outback community of farmers, artists, servants, cameleers and Aboriginal peoples, and forces a broader reckoning in this uneasy colonial society. This is a slowburn mystery of literary merit, with a complex, multi-layered plot and intense atmospheric effect. The 2023 Walter Scott Prize judges described it as a “rich and empathetic novel” which offered the reader the keys to understanding Australia, summoning its landscape—”at once beautiful and alien”—and its “burning sun” directly onto the page.