Nine Kilometres Down

About this book

Nine Kilometres Down is a taut, warm, surprising survival novel that becomes a first contact novel and then becomes an argument, and it is set almost entirely in the dark, which is why every illustration in it is a study in lamplight, glowing rock and the warm light of a people who have lived without the sun since before agriculture. Thabo Molefe is forty seven, a rock drill operator in an invented deep gold mine in southern Africa, a careful man with nineteen years underground and a reputation for listening to the rock. When a seismic event drops the hanging wall across the return airway at nine kilometres, he is cut off with two others: Sipho Dube, twenty three, on his fourth month, and Elsie Mahlangu, thirty eight, a shift supervisor with a broken forearm and the clearest head of the three. They have lamps for thirty hours, water for six days, and air that will go bad long before either.