Speaking in Silence — Audio Context
A conversation recorded between drafts using Notebook LLM — part reading, part reflection. In it, the hosts talk about how silence, miscommunication, and rhythm shaped The Language Between Us, and how love often survives in the spaces where words fail. It’s less an interview than an echo — an attempt to listen differently.
Listen: Finding the Words — a conversation on connection
About the Book
Love has its own grammar — and sometimes it stops translating.
The Language Between Us follows Ava and Ruben, two people who built a life together, raised children, and quietly began to lose the rhythm that once made them whole. Told in reverse, the novel begins in the middle of their unraveling and moves back toward the spark that started it all.
Set in Amsterdam, it’s a story about empathy, miscommunication, and the space that love needs to breathe. There are no villains here — just two people who loved each other the best they could, until they couldn’t anymore.
It’s not a story about falling out of love. It’s about what happens after — the quiet courage of letting go.
Inside the Book
The Making of The Language Between Us
A story built like memory — through fragments, reflection, and the spaces between words.
The Language Between Us began as a collection of notes, emails, and unspoken apologies — an attempt to understand why good intentions so often collapse under the weight of silence. It became a novel about translation: not between languages, but between hearts.
“Love isn’t what we say. It’s what we mean when the words don’t work anymore.”
The book was written in alternating voices, then rearranged in reverse — a structure that mirrors how we remember love: crisis first, then joy, then the ache of what’s gone.
Sketched first scenes about silence and distance — written between music projects and train rides.
Wrote two perspectives in parallel — her letters and his reflections — to explore translation between voices.
Blended design principles with rhythm. Treated dialogue as composition — tone, pause, and tempo mattered more than grammar.
Final manuscript prepared for digital and print release. Language and silence became one theme — not opposites, but partners.
About the Author
Bert Laker is a Dutch-Caribbean writer based in Amsterdam whose work explores how stories and systems shape human connection.
After a children’s book and a romantic novel, The Language Between Us is his most personal work to date — a meditation on love, communication, and the spaces that form between two people who mean well but lose their rhythm.
He believes in the quiet courage of honesty, in second drafts, and in the idea that even endings can be written with tenderness.
