This page is intended for literary agents and publishing industry professionals. It contains a full synopsis with spoilers, selected passages from the manuscript, and an early look at Book Two, Shadows of Dawn.

If you have arrived here by invitation, welcome. If you stumbled in by accident, you are still welcome, but be warned — open spoilers are sitting everywhere.

Synopsis

THE BERBIAN CHRONICLES: A NEW DAWN
 

Three hundred and forty-one years ago, Lieutenant Constanza stopped at the Trigger Lake Comfort Station and lost something from his pocket. Minutes later, the Emph ended civilization. The matte-black device blinked once and entered dormancy under a cleaner-bot dock. It waits for centuries.

Scar is a girl at Trigger Lake Camp, a community of fifty souls descended from the people stranded there when the world stopped. Following her curiosity, while exploring the ruins of the Before, she spots a faint red light beneath the old station’s rotting dock. The device is perfectly preserved. Witch Woman, the camp’s elder, recognizes it from a dream: a pale girl named Shasta pressing it into her hands. Take it to Mariposa. They’ll know what to do.This is not a post-apocalyptic story. This is the story of a Renaissance that eventually takes humanity to the stars. The catastrophe is three centuries past; the rubble has long since been swallowed by old-growth forest. The Berbian Chronicles starts when the Phoenix hatches, about the precise moment a civilization stops surviving and begins, haltingly, to look ahead.
Scar sets out with Witch Woman and her perpetually goofball companions Hank and Jake. Their road leads through the Smiling Sun CoOp, a steam-powered agricultural community, and on through Beetsville, a vast beet farming operation run by a community of industrious neo-hipsters.
In Berbia, a city of a thousand souls built on the ruins of old Mariopolis, they discover that the second half of Scar’s device has sat on a shelf for 150 years, held by the mysterious Keepon the far side of the city’s overgrown ruins.

We meet Bartholomew, a Guild Scavenger, and principled trader, and Varley, Berbia’s Town puppeteer, working out of Pratchet Square, whose ancient Punch and Judy figures have strong opinions about everything and a disconcerting habit of being right.

When the two halves of the artifact are reunited at the wild bird sanctuary at the city’s heart, they snap together with a flare of blue-violet light.

A calm, patient voice speaks for the first time in 341 years: “Lieutenant Constanza. Lieutenant Coombes. Are you present?”

No one answers.
The united artifact is brought back to Berbia, arriving at Jonno’s gate during the autumn fest. It does not identify itself immediately. Instead, it recruits an honour guard from among those it has encountered, selecting for prior action rather than status. The group retrieves an ancient baby carriage and conveys the artifact to a long-sealed facility at the edge of the settlement. The site remains inert. The crowd gathers, expecting some form of activation, but nothing responds.
Zan Li’s steam engine, brought in close during the procession, continues running.
Then it fails. A steam explosion tears through the clearing, catastrophically injuring Zan Li. The Recovery Center doors open, and medical drones flood out before anyone can react, cocoon Zan Li, and carry him inside. Scar runs after them.
The green light above the door goes solid. The Petawat Disaster Recovery Center is open. Within, they find Facil, an AI instantiated twenty minutes before their arrival, featureless by deliberate design, speaking with technical precision that frequently outruns its audience. What follows is the first fluent conversation between the old world and the new.



Generations later, in a museum orbiting a distant sun, Varley’s puppet staff and Scar’s dragonfly locket sit in a glass case. Visitors who pause long enough trigger something unexpected: Punch and Judy, performing across an unimaginable distance for people who cannot point at Earth but are, statistically, her descendants. Most keep walking. A few stop.
Scar and her companions did not build the Renaissance. They lit the fire that made it possible.

The Berbian Chronicles: A New Dawn is the first book in a planned series following generations of humanity as, after a fall, it rises and reaches for the stars.

FURTHER READING –
10 page tastes from the book and a teaser from the next