The Brightness Between Us(2024)

Eliot Schrefer

In this sequel to The Darkness Outside Us, a Stonewall Honor Book, New York Times bestselling author Eliot Schrefer delivers another ambitious, genre-bending novel and epic love story that spans thousands of years and the far reaches of the galaxy.

Seventeen years have gone by since the Coordinated Endeavor crashed on a distant exoplanet. Ambrose Cusk and Kodiak Celius are now the devoted parents of two teenage children, Owl and Yarrow, in a hardscrabble frontier home. Though life on Minerva is full of danger, the family’s bond is enough to make it all worth it—until they learn that the biggest threat to their survival might come from within.

More than thirty thousand years in the past, Ambrose wakes on Earth to find that his mission to save his sister was a ruse. His mother betrayed him, and the truth of her plan—to send twenty clones of him to continue human civilization thousands of light-years away—sets Ambrose spiraling. When he discovers that another spacefarer is suffering his same fate, he will have to decide whether to risk crossing a world at war to reach him.

Separated by time and space, a young family and two strangers learn that their lives are intimately intertwined. They race to uncover the unexpected connections that might save them all . . . and perhaps humanity as well.