THE SUN WALKS DOWN

In September 1883, the Australian outback town of Fairly huddles under strange, vivid sunsets. One of their own has gone missing – six-year-old Denny Wallace – and the whole town is intent on finding him. As they search 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 – explore their own relationships with this complex landscape, its unsettling history of dispossession, and the looming threat of agricultural failure.

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.

"THE SUN WALKS DOWN is the book I'm always longing to find: brilliant,
fresh and compulsively readable. It is marvelous. I loved it start to
finish."
Ann Patchett

Australia: Allen and Unwin, October 2022
US: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2023
UK: Scribe, March 2023