Nachtlamp (edition 1997)

Against the backdrop of the Gaean Reach, the widely populated region of space where the full diversity of human development is revealed, the story of Jaro Fath unfolds: from wildling orphan to spaceship captain, a tale of adventure and discovery wittily told.

In The Handbook of the Planets, the entry describing Kammerwelt: the fourth world in the entourage of Robert Palmer’s Star, drifting through a sector known as The Dragon’s Maw out toward the edge of the galaxy. Here a boy aged five, beaten and alone, is found by tourists Luel and Perceia Fath from the distant world of Gallingale. The boy knows his first name, Jaro, and is thereafter haunted by an inner voice of torment and a memory of his mother’s terror – throughout a childhood and youth made happy by the Faths on Gallingale. Academics both, Jaro’s adoptive parents insist that Jaro gain a good education before embarking on a quest to learn the truth of his origins. However, before Jaro has completed his course at the Institute, the Faths are both blown to bits by a fellow academic making a statement about the neglect of his own work.

Jaro teams up with space vagabond Evan Tarr and old schoolfriend Skirl to journey to Kammerwelt where the appalling events of his early years come into focus – and his quest becomes a search for vengeance. His mother was murdered; his father was lost on the strange and deadly planet Romarth. And on Romarth the full truth is at last revealed: Evan Tarr is his father, and in a deep dungeon there lives Jaro’s twin Garlet… the voice in Jaro’s head, now that of a twisted psychopath who will stop at nothing to kill Jaro…