The Brightness Between Us

The Brightness Between Us continues Eliot Schrefer's Darkness Outside Us series, following two timelines and two versions of the same family across thousands of years.

On the exoplanet Minerva, seventeen years after the Coordinated Endeavor's crash landing, Ambrose Cusk and Kodiak Celius are the devoted parents of teenage children Owl and Yarrow, carving out a life on a hardscrabble frontier. Life on Minerva is dangerous, but the family's bond makes it worth enduring, until they discover their genetic code has been sabotaged: a virus that causes miscarriages and turns adolescents violently unstable. When the crisis comes to a head, Owl must choose how far her forgiveness for her brother can stretch.

Threaded through this story is an earlier point in the family's history, more than thirty thousand years in the past: Ambrose wakes on a 25th-century Earth riven by Cold War-style tension between two rival superpowers, the Fédération and Dimokratía, teetering toward nuclear war and climate collapse. He learns that his mission to rescue his sister was a ruse, and that his mother's true plan was to send clones of him and Kodiak across the galaxy to found a new colony, whatever became of the Earth they left behind.

An ambitious, genre-bending YA science-fiction novel spanning millennia, The Brightness Between Us asks whether love is reason enough for humanity to survive itself.