The Sun Walks Down: A Novel

Short-Listed for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction\n“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, author of The Dutch House\nFiona McFarlane’s blazingly brilliant new novel, The Sun Walks Down, tells the many-voiced, many-sided story of a boy lost in colonial Australia.\nIn 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, farmers, mothers, Indigenous trackers, cameleers, children, artists, schoolteachers, widows, maids, policemen―confront their relationships, both with one another and with the landscape they inhabit.\nThe colonial Australia of The Sun Walks Down is 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.\nTold in many ways and by many voices, Fiona McFarlane’s new novel pulses with love, art, and the unbearable divine. It arrives like a vision, mythic and bright with meaning.

Literature & Fiction

McFarlane, Fiona

Literary

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

A gripping, enigmatic collection of linked short stories about the reverberations of a serial killer's crimes in the lives of everyday people. In the small town of Barrow, Australia, people go about their ordinary lives. They drive to work through the dense state forest. They raise their families. They flirt and yearn. They lie and confess. Some of them leave home. Some of them return. Darkness thrums beneath the surface of these ordinary lives: the violence of one man, a serial killer whose murders made Barrow infamous. His twelve victims--women, men, mostly young--are long gone, but their deaths are felt, beyond the forest where they were buried, beyond this country, beyond even this time. In the past, where a young woman on a school trip to Rome sees something she shouldn't have. In the present, where a man confronts an ancient grief on the suburban streets of Texas. In the future, in the hands of journalists and podcast hosts and television actors whose livelihoods hinge on the twin spectacles of loss and violence. Highway Thirteen is a luminous wonder: a book about the collisions between public and private selves, between parents and children, between history and what comes after, between the living and the dead. Fiona McFarlane's roving vision is itself a story about stories--those we tell, retell, forget, sell, disprove, inherit, live through--and a work of extraordinary power and magic.

Highway Thirteen: Stories

A mesmerizing first novel about trust, dependence, and fear, from a major new writer
Ruth is widowed, her sons are grown, and she lives in an isolated beach house outside of town. Her routines are few and small. One day a stranger arrives at her door, looking as if she has been blown in from the sea. This woman―Frida―claims to be a care worker sent by the government. Ruth lets her in. Now that Frida is in her house, is Ruth right to fear the tiger she hears on the prowl at night, far from its jungle habitat? Why do memories of childhood in Fiji press upon her with increasing urgency? How far can she trust this mysterious woman, Frida, who seems to carry with her own troubled past? And how far can Ruth trust herself? The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane's hypnotic first novel, is no simple tale of a crime committed and a mystery solved. This is a tale that soars above its own suspense to tell us, with exceptional grace and beauty, about ageing, love, trust, dependence, and fear; about processes of colonization; and about things (and people) in places they shouldn't be. Here is a new writer who comes to us fully formed, working wonders with language, renewing our faith in the power of fiction to describe the mysterious workings of our minds.
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013

The Night Guest: A Novel

What a terrible thing at a time like this: to own a house, and the trees around it. Janet sat rigid in her seat. The plane lifted from the city and her house fell away, consumed by the other houses. Janet worried about her own particular garden and her emptied refrigerator and her lamps that had been timed to come on at six.
So begins "Mycenae," a story in The High Places, Fiona McFarlane's first story collection. Her stories skip across continents, eras, and genres to chart the borderlands of emotional life. In "Mycenae," she describes a middle-aged couple's disastrous vacation with old friends. In "Good News for Modern Man," a scientist lives on a small island with only a colossal squid and the ghost of Charles Darwin for company. And in the title story, an Australian farmer turns to Old Testament methods to relieve a fatal drought. Each story explores what Flannery O'Connor called "mystery and manners." The collection dissects the feelings--longing, contempt, love, fear--that animate our existence and hints at a reality beyond the smallness of our lives.
Salon's Laura Miller called McFarlane's The Night Guest "a novel of uncanny emotional penetration . . . How could anyone so young portray so persuasively what it feels like to look back on a lot more life than you can see in front of you?" The High Places is further evidence of McFarlane's preternatural talent, a debut collection that reads like the selected works of a literary great.

The High Places: Stories

Short Stories & Anthologies

A mesmerizing first novel about trust, dependence, and fear, from a major new writer
Ruth is widowed, her sons are grown, and she lives in an isolated beach house outside of town. Her routines are few and small. One day a stranger arrives at her door, looking as if she has been blown in from the sea. This woman―Frida―claims to be a care worker sent by the government. Ruth lets her in. Now that Frida is in her house, is Ruth right to fear the tiger she hears on the prowl at night, far from its jungle habitat? Why do memories of childhood in Fiji press upon her with increasing urgency? How far can she trust this mysterious woman, Frida, who seems to carry with her own troubled past? And how far can Ruth trust herself? The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane's hypnotic first novel, is no simple tale of a crime committed and a mystery solved. This is a tale that soars above its own suspense to tell us, with exceptional grace and beauty, about ageing, love, trust, dependence, and fear; about processes of colonization; and about things (and people) in places they shouldn't be. Here is a new writer who comes to us fully formed, working wonders with language, renewing our faith in the power of fiction to describe the mysterious workings of our minds. 
A Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of 2013

Winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize
“THERE IS IN THESE TALES A RECURRENT ‘FEELING OF QUEASY ANTICIPATION,’ AS ONE OF MCFARLANE’S CHARACTERS OBSERVES, ‘AS IF SOME TERRIBLE THING MIGHT HAPPEN AT ANY MOMENT.’ . . . IT’S A MOOD YOU ASSOCIATE WITH FLANNERY O’CONNOR, EVIDENTLY ONE OF MCFARLANE’S INFLUENCES, AS WELL AS PATRICIA HIGHSMITH.”―THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (EDITORS’ CHOICE) Ranging from Australia to Greece, England to a Pacific island, the stories in Fiona McFarlane’s story collection The High Places journey across continents, eras, and genres, charting the pivotal moments of people’s lives. In “Mycenae,” a middle-aged couple embarks on a disastrous vacation in the company of old friends. In “Good News for Modern Man,” a scientist conducts research on a small, remote island, where he is haunted by a colossal squid and the ghost of Charles Darwin. And in the title story, an Australian farmer turns to Old Testament methods to relieve a fatal drought. All are confronted with events that make them see themselves and their lives from a fresh perspective―and what they do as a result is as unpredictable as life itself.

Picador

The Night Guest

Sceptre/Hodder & Stoughton

The High Places: Winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2017

Genre Fiction

BANTAM BOOKS

Ruth is widowed, her sons are grown, and she lives in an isolated beach house outside town. Her routines are few and small. One day a stranger arrives at her door, looking as if she has been blown in from the sea. This woman—Frida—claims to be a care worker sent by the government. Ruth lets her in.
Now that Frida is in the house, is Ruth right to fear the tiger she hears on the prowl at night, far from its jungle habitat? Why do memories of her childhood in Fiji press upon her with increasing urgency? How far can she trust this mysterious woman, Frida, who seems to carry her own troubled past? And how far can Ruth trust herself?
The Night Guest, Fiona McFarlane’s hypnotic first novel, is no simple tale of a crime committed and a mystery solved. This is a story that soars above its own suspense and tells us, with exceptional grace and beauty, about aging, love, trust, dependence, and fear; about processes of colonization; and about things (and people) in places they shouldn’t be. Here is a new writer who comes to us fully formed, creating wonders with language, renewing our faith in the power of fiction to describe the mysterious workings of our minds.

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Books by McFarlane, Fiona

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McFarlane, Fiona. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Sun Walks Down: A Novel

Highway Thirteen: Stories

The Night Guest: A Novel

The High Places: Stories

The Night Guest: A Novel

The High Places: Stories

The Sun Walks Down: A Novel

The Night Guest

The High Places: Winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize 2017

The Night Guest