Gavin Chait

"And they share each other there in the stillness and gentleness of the night." Chait shows us how much can be said with so little. The focus here is with the characters and their setting - the story takes a back seat to the relationships. A human-like alien lands near a West African village. He needs help getting back to his family. Storytelling features prominently. Along the way the alien changes everyone he meets and together they change the world. This is a world of extreme contrasts - on the one hand brutally harsh and forbidding and on the other compellingly hopeful. This was the UK edition with a beautiful engraved cover shipped from London.… (mehr)

Again, it was the cover that did it. The eerie face, with its scored lines and sunburst of golden rays, reminded me of an ancient tribal mask. I was intrigued by the apparent disconnect between that and the sci-fi plot summarised on the back of the book. Gavin Chait’s first novel turned out to be quite different from any such novel I’ve read before, and not just for its African setting. While on the one hand it offers a sobering future, in which the planet’s ecology has been ravaged by greed, it also shows seedlings of hope, as people strive, even in the darkest days, to create a better world...

For the rest of the review, please see my blog:
http://theidlewoman.net/2016/08/27/lament-for-the-fallen-gavin-chait/… (mehr)