Early in The Sun Walks Down, Mary Wallace – mother to six-year-old Denny, who has gone missing in a dust storm – throws her husband a ‘general look of bafflement at having found herself here, in this place, with these people’. It’s a symptomatic moment early in a novel that contains myriad displays of perplexity by various characters – at each other, at situations they create or must navigate, at the meaning of life.

The Sun Walks Down is Fiona McFarlane’s third book of fiction, following her startling début, The Night Guest (2013), and a short story collection, The High Places (2016). It is set in late colonial South Australia, in and around the fictional town of Fairly in the southern Flinders Ranges. The district’s farmers are trying to grow wheat: some have committed ‘to at least one more harvest’, while others have ‘already given up’ or soon will. McFarlane’s prose evokes ambitions and absurdities, but also the familial richness, of white people’s attempts to tame the land.

The plot is unremarkable: a child is missing in harsh terrain – perhaps lost, perhaps kidnapped. The days pass, the sun is punishing, the searchers may or may not be competent. But beyond the opening pages, there is little tension. The story’s qualities stem not from the account of the search for Denny but from the big-picture questions the search enables.