Buying Options
Kindle Price: | $14.99 |
includes tax, if applicable | |
Sold by: | PRH UK This price was set by the publisher. |

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet or computer – no Kindle device required. Learn more
Read instantly on your browser with Kindle Cloud Reader.
Using your mobile phone camera, scan the code below and download the Kindle app.
Lament for the Fallen Kindle Edition
Gavin Chait (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
Amazon Price | New from | Used from |
Hardcover
"Please retry" |
—
| — | — |
Mass Market Paperback
"Please retry" |
—
| $23.69 | — |
A strange craft falls from the stars and crashes into the jungle near an isolated West African community. Inside, the locals discover the broken body of a man unlike any they have seen before – a man who is perhaps something more than human.
His name is Samara and he speaks with terror of a place called Tartarus – an orbiting prison where hope doesn’t exist.
As Samara begins to heal, he also transforms the lives his rescuers. But in so doing, he attracts the attention of a warlord whose gunmen now threaten the very existence of the villagers themselves – and the one, slim chance Samara has of finding his way home.
And all the while, in the darkness above, waits the simmering fury at the heart of Tartarus . . .
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherTransworld Digital
- Publication date28 July 2016
- File size1479 KB
Product description
Book Description
Review
Lyrical prose and imaginative world-building . . . the book is gripping, powerful and frequently impressive . . . an ambitious and intelligent work that marks out Chait as a writer worthy of further attention. -- Saxon Bullock ― SFX magazine
Out of this world engrossing. You don’t have to understand the science to believe in it . . . superb world building . . . aided by enchanting fables and philosophies weaved into the narrative, Lament for the Fallen is an often poetic, occasionally disturbing, and always enthralling tale that has all the thematic ingredients to make it one of the best sci-fi books of 2016. ― CULTUREFLY
Richly drawn . . . a smart, ideas-driven novel . . . a promising and ambitious debut. ― SCiFiNOW
Loved the whole experience as Gavin brought solid world building into the mix alongside cracking pace as well as dialogue that just tripped off the page . . . a great read . . . Magic. ― FALCATA TIMES
Highly readable . . . Chait should be applauded for managing that all important trick of getting you to keep turning that page until there aren't any left . . . smart, ideas-led science fiction with a literary fiction bent. ― STARBURST magazine
Astonishingly accomplished . . . the writing is very elegant, switching between scenes of shocking brutality and images of incredible beauty, but the thing that really sets this book apart from other sci-fi that I’ve read is its heart. A deep humanity animates the very core of the book . . . a beautifully constructed novel, interrogating the question of what makes us human and what makes us humane . . . do seek out this novel because I think you’ll be intrigued and pleasantly surprised even if you don’t normally read sci-fi. ― IDLEWOMAN.NET --This text refers to the mass_market edition.
From the Inside Flap
Something has fallen from the stars and crashed into the jungle near an isolated West African community. The locals discover a ruined vessel and, inside, the shattered body of a man. But this is a man unlike any they have seen before – a man who is perhaps something more than human.
His name is Samara and he speaks with terror of a place called Tartarus – a place where hope doesn’t exist. To go there is to face death, one way or another.
As Samara heals himself, he helps transform the lives of those who rescued him, but in so doing attracts the attention of the warlord who would rule this benighted land. Now this butcher and his gunmen threaten the very existence of the villagers themselves – and the one, slim chance Samara has of finding his way home.
And all the while, in the darkness above, waits the simmering fury that lies at the heart of Tartarus . . .
Shot through with hope and possessing a transcendent sense of wonder, this thrilling debut signals the arrival of a remarkable new voice. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.
About the Author
Product details
- ASIN : B019CGXWIY
- Publisher : Transworld Digital; 1st edition (28 July 2016)
- Language : English
- File size : 1479 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 384 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: 867,717 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- 15,855 in Literary Fiction (Kindle Store)
- 36,410 in Contemporary Fiction (Kindle Store)
- 39,178 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Born in Cape Town in 1974, Gavin Chait emigrated to the UK nearly ten years ago. He has degrees in Microbiology & Biochemistry, and Electrical Engineering. He is an economic development strategist and data scientist, and has travelled extensively in Africa, Latin America, Europe and Asia and is now based in Oxford. His first novel, Lament for the Fallen, was critically acclaimed (Eric Brown in the Guardian called it ‘a compulsively readable, life affirming tale’). Our Memory Like Dust is his second.
Follow Gavin on Twitter @GavinChait, or at https://gavinchait.com
Customer reviews
Top reviews from other countries

Its science-fiction and is written by debut author Gavin Chait who is according to his blog, a data scientist in his day-job with degrees in Microbiology, Biochemistry and Mechanical Engineering. Certainly the science of this futuristic novel seems solid to me and perfectly believable.
It isn’t a militaristic science fiction story like Ancillary Justice which I reviewed in June 2016; it’s more like the Man Who Fell to Earth, a kind of aliens-fall-to-earth-bearing-gifts tale. Set in West Africa deep in oil-rich Nigeria sometime in the 22nd Century in an age when there is no demand for oil, it centres on what happens when a starship lands near a remote village close to the border with Cameroon. The pilot is injured but the villagers manage not only to rescue and aid him but also hide all traces of his ship and his presence from marauding local Warlords. It is a brilliant set-up and although the narrative meanders a little and as most other reviewers observe, is a little too long, I never at any stage got bored. One reviewer on Goodreads says the aliens-fall-to-earth-bearing-gifts tale is ‘hoary’. Well, not to me it isn’t. Another complains that Chait adopts every sci-fi ‘chestnut’ ever written: again, how would I know, I almost never read Science Fiction. I loved the fact that it was rooted in a believable future post-oil world but with many other features that could credibly be invented or developed in the next thousand years: AI of course; longevity [most of the characters are 150-years old] and 3D printing to name just some.
It is a first novel and okay you shouldn’t make allowances for that, it isn’t expected and why should you qualify your review to accommodate miss-steps of structure or concatenation. Not that there are many of those: the stories and ballads do slow the pace . . . there are far too many . . . although I appreciate that he is trying to get away from writing just a Boys Own adventure story into something a little more profound and African. I think it does suffer slightly from first-novel-itis insofar as there are too many characters and threads; as though Chait expects this to be his once-only book and wants to pack into it every idea he ever had. But I didn’t find that a problem: what I did find a problem were all the African names; Aicha and Aisha and Asachai . . . and that was just the A’s. Each short chapter takes a different POV and by the time Aisha came round again, I couldn’t remember if she was his daughter or his mistress.
It is currently number 31131 in Amazon’s Science Fiction & Fantasy best-seller lists, which is disappointing; it has average of 4* on Amazon and 3* on Goodreads, the two-star ‘hoary’ review has hurt its rankings. It is published by Doubleday. Doubleday is Transworld's more literary hardcover imprint, publishing authors including Kate Atkinson, Rachel Joyce, Joanna Trollope and Joanne Harris, so it is hard to justify comments that it isn’t well-written. They would have published under a different imprint if they were unsure of the writing quality.
They should get the Marketing Department to give it a push, nominate it for some awards. Perhaps when it is issued in paperback it will do better. It is very good.



