Another new book from David Hiscox: Corbyn Bryant

Available on Amazon and Kindle

Synopsis

Corbyn Bryant has never quite fitted into the rhythms of Compton Mullberry, a small Somerset town where nothing of any great significance has ever occurred. Quiet, solitary and more comfortable with stones than with people, he spends his days exploring the abandoned quarry on the town’s edge, a place most locals rarely go. To Corbyn, the quarry is a refuge: a landscape of deep time, where the world makes more sense than the conversations he struggles to navigate.

Everything changes the day he uncovers a rare fossil embedded in a slab of limestone. What begins as a private thrill quickly becomes a public storm. The quarry becomes the centre of competing hopes and fears. A local company, Butterworth Development, have submitted proposals for the proposed building of a large housing estate on the land whilst environmentalists and concerned locals rally to protect the site.

As the town divides, strange events ripple outward.

The people around him bring their own histories, fears, and longings. Their lives begin to intersect in unexpected ways, pulled together by the quarry’s quiet gravity.

For Corbyn, the mystery becomes more than a puzzle of geology. As he tries to understand the fossil, the community he lives in, and the strange coincidences that seem to follow him, he is forced to confront the connections he has avoided for most of his life. The quarry becomes a mirror: of the town’s past and of the fragile ties that hold a community together.

What emerges is not a tale of clear answers, but of the search for meaning in the spaces between them. Corbyn begins to see that the links between events and people may be real or imagined, accidental or essential. Yet each connection shapes the choices they make, and the futures they fear or hope for.

As tensions rise and the truth edges closer, Corbyn must decide whether to retreat into the safety of solitude or step forward into the tangled, uncertain world of human connection. The quarry may hold its own secrets, but the deeper mystery lies in the lives woven around it.

Corbyn Bryant is a story about a small town teetering on the verge of change and about one solitary man learning that even the quietest life is bound to others in ways he cannot always see.