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1883: In the dust bowl of Australia, a small boy goes missing.
1883: In the dust bowl of Australia, a small boy goes missing.
In September 1883, a small town in the South Australian outback huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. Six-year-old Denny Wallace has gone missing during a dust storm, and the entire community is caught up in the search for him. As they scour 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 – confront their relationships with each other and with the ancient landscape they inhabit.
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 in which Denny could be found, or lost forever.
Flinders Ranges
The author starts the novel with a description of the setting:
“If you drive north out of the South Australian city of Adelaide for five hours, you’ll reach the heart of a stony deser called the Flinders Ranges. It’s an extraordinary landscape, vividly colourful despite its aridity and made up of broad plains, deep river gorges, and mountains so old they’ve collapsed in on themselves.”
“The story of the Flinders Ranges is one of unsettlement, beginning with the frontier wars of the early nineteenth century, when European settlers claimed Aboriginal land for their own.”
TheBookTrail’s bookreview of The Sun Walks Down- Fiona McFarlane
Destination/Location: South Australia Author:Fiona McFarlane Departure: 1883
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