Rockabye, Grady

James Grady made himself at home on Pru'ut. He learned the Kya people's ways, married their woman Shallra, built a life among them. Then one thoughtless step onto the Chief's shadow erases everything. Now he's a man without a name, condemned by a custom he never understood, hunted by the people he thought were his kin. What begins as a fish-out-of-water cultural exchange curdles into something far darker: a meditation on identity, belonging, and how quickly the ground can give way beneath you. Mason writes with tight, controlled menace, turning a simple mistake into a descent toward doom. The alien world feels genuinely strange, its logic both coherent and deadly. This is science fiction that borrows from Kafka the sense of accusation without explanation, from Orwell the trap of systems that consume the individual. A slim, tense novel about what remains when everything that defined you is stripped away.