Each Wednesday, The New Yorker’s editors and critics choose “the most captivating, notable, brilliant, surprising, absorbing, weird, thought-provoking, and talked-about reads.”

Fiona McFarlane’s ‘The Sun Walks Down’ was first on the Ficton & Poetry list. The review is below and here.

The Sun Walks Down 
by Fiona McFarlane (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Fiction

Set in rural Australia in the late nineteenth century, this ambitious novel assembles a band of characters—including a white farmer, an Aboriginal farmhand, and a Swedish painter—who are drawn together by the disappearance, in a dust storm, of a six-year-old boy. McFarlane’s figures emerge in intricate detail, defined by their petty desires, their moral imperfections, and their relationship both to the cataclysm of colonization and to the grandiosity of the landscape and the sun, which, for some, takes on near-divine significance. “There’s no way to describe these skies,” the painter writes to a colleague in Europe. “If I had to try, I would say that they are light shipwrecked by dark.”