Fiona McFarlane · 2022 · survival

Shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. In September 1883 a six-year-old walks into a dust storm on the Willochra Plain and does not come home, and a whole colonial community goes out after him - farmers, cameleers, a Swedish painter, Aboriginal trackers - under sunsets made lurid by Krakatoa, which had erupted the month before.

1. 1
   Undelcarra

   The Wallace holding on the Willochra Plain, September 1883 - failing wheat, a deaf mother, five daughters and a boy of six sent out for kindling who walks into a red dust storm and does not come back.

2. 2
   Fairly

   The town, where Denny's sisters are at the wedding of the police constable and Minna Baumann - and McFarlane cuts from a lost child to sexual comedy in one page, which tells you what the book is going to do.

3. 3
   The Willochra Plain

   Everyone fans out: landowners, farmers, cameleers, a Swedish painter, the constable on his wedding day, and Billy Rough, the Wallaces' Aboriginal farmhand, who reads the ground in a way none of the settlers can.

4. 4
   The ranges

   Up into the gorges of the Flinders, littered with the stone ruins of colonial farms that failed - and Denny somewhere in it, doing what he was told: look for water, break branches, mark trees, make big tracks.

5. 5
   Port Augusta

   The head of the gulf and the nearest thing to a city - the railhead the fleeces go to, and the direction from which any real help would have to come, which is to say slowly.

6. 6
   Undelcarra

   Six days of searching under sunsets made unnaturally vivid by Krakatoa, which erupted the month before - and a landscape that McFarlane has said is the reason she wrote the book at all.