The title is taken from "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", a song by Bob Dylan: "When your gravity fails and negativity don't pull you through".
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The novel is told from the perspective of Marîd Audran, a young man from low origins (coming from the Maghreb, and being the son of a prostitute), who is a small-scale operator and hustler in the Budayeen, the entertainment and criminal quarter of an unnamed Middle-Eastern city, probably somewhere in the Levant, based on several geographical references to other countries around the region.
Gravity's Rainbow | Gravity | gravity | Gravity racer | Gravity of Earth | Gravity Games | Gravity Probe B | Gravity (film) | Defying Gravity | Teton Gravity Research | Gravity (John Mayer song) | Gravity (Fred Frith album) | Defying Gravity (Keith Urban album) | When Gravity Fails | The Anti-Gravity Room | Standard gravity | Slaves to Gravity | Newton's law of gravity | List of quantum gravity researchers | Induced gravity | Gravity's Rainbow (album) | Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment | Gravity of Love | Gravity (Lecrae album) | Gravity Kills | Gravity hill | Gravity Gets Things Done | Gravity Entertainment | gravity dam | Gravity anomaly |
The three published novels were When Gravity Fails (1987), A Fire in the Sun (1989), and The Exile Kiss (1991); Effinger also contributed to the computer game Circuit's Edge (1990), set between the first two books.