The Blue Between Us

In the red open pits of Kolwezi, in the south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, eleven-year-old Amani climbs each morning into tunnels too narrow for grown men, digging the blue stone, cobalt, that powers the bright machines of the wider world. He cannot afford school, so he has taught himself to read from the company's discarded papers, and at night, by the light of a failing torch, he writes letters in a battered notebook: letters to the unknown stranger, somewhere far to the north, who will one day hold the very thing his hands have pulled from the dark.

Two thousand kilometres away, in Brussels, fifteen-year-old Margot Vermeulen unwraps a new phone on a birthday that has come too soon after her mother's funeral. Her father is the man whose job, at one of the world's most admired technology companies, is to promise the world that no child's hands ever touch its products. Margot is half Belgian and half Congolese, grieving a mother she is only beginning to understand, and rooted in a country she has n ever seen.

When a journalist's footage from a Congolese mine is broadcast across the planet, a single image, a boy, a notebook, a name, sets two lives on a collision course neither could have imagined. The Blue Between Us is a novel about the things we hold and the people who hold them for us; about a continent's stolen past and a planet's borrowed future; and about whether a girl and a boy who were never meant to meet can close the unbearable, electric blue that both connects and divides us all.

Told in two braided voices and spanning Kolwezi, Kinshasa, and Brussels, this is a story for everyone who has ever held the world in the palm of their hand.