The Sun Walks Down

Fiona McFarlane Sceptre £18.99

The broiling Australian outback, 1883. A young white boy is missing in the desert, which generates much tension, as do the fraught relations between the settlers and the indigenous people jointly searching for him. But this novel is also made hypnotic by its wonderfully atmospheric dreaminess. Hay dust ‘glitters in a shaft of light’; a big red ant is ‘slightly translucent’; sunrise is a ‘muted, lazy pink’. And at nightfall, ‘the last crows flew towards the dark.’