In the twentieth century, wealth and power was dictated by access to oil. This century will have different kingmakers, perhaps different wars.

We depend on a handful of metals and rare earths to power our phones and computers. Increasingly, we rely on them to power our cars and our homes. Whoever controls these finite commodities will become rich beyond imagining.

Sanderson journeys to meet the characters, companies, and nations scrambling for the new resources, linking remote mines in the Congo and Chile's Atacama Desert to giant Chinese battery factories, shadowy commodity traders, secretive billionaires, and a new generation of scientists endeavouring to invent the next breakthrough.

This is the full story of the hidden quest to power all our lives and, in doing so, to take the keys to the twenty-first century.