The Tungsten Foundation: A Novel of Walls

By Dr. Cor P.M. van Houte

In July 1994, while Kigali burned, a Belgian architect named Frost descended into a vault beneath the city to collect money he needed to save his dying wife. He turned his phone face-down. He finished the job. He left.
He has been building ever since.

Thirty years later, Frost lives in a fortress of his own design in the hills of Belgium - tungsten walls, fourteen cameras, a private security detail moving through the pines. Beside him is Sandrine, twenty-two years younger, who was sixteen in Kigali in 1994 and lost everyone in the first week. She built the castle. She holds the master override. She has never told him everything she knows about why she found him, and he has never told her everything he did in the vault.
This is what they have built their life on.

Then Elias Ntaganda arrives - the man who was in the vault with Frost, who built the code, who was left with too little money and too much knowledge, whose patience has been geologic and whose left hand still trembles. He carries a letter written by Frost's first wife in her hospital bed in the final weeks of her life. He has been carrying it for thirty years.
The Tungsten Foundation is a novel about what we build to protect the people we love, and what those structures cost the people we didn't protect. It is set in Belgium and Rwanda, in 1989 and 1994 and 2024, in hospital rooms and vaults and a castle in the Land of Herve where a woman stands at a security panel at three in the morning, listening to a child breathe through a door.

For readers of W.G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Joseph Conrad.

Cornelis van Houte

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GPVT3VVV
• ISBN13: 9798249535742
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 258 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.0" x 9.0"