Discovering Nova is the first in the Novan trilogy.

Lee and Jenny Martin are ordinary but skilled people coming toward the end of their working lives in Bristol. While Lee is taking a walk with Métisse, a red merle Shollie, he encounters a woman who calls out to him by name. Carrying a distinct Mycenaean appearance and an almost regal affectation to match her claim, she introduces herself as Cleopatra VIII. She offers them a radical chance at renewed life in exchange for completing a huge fifty-year Task. Supporting this mission is the first sapient race humanity will ever encounter; a non-human species that provides infrastructure geo-engineering and an interstellar gate, yet prefers to remain hidden in the background. They make their dislike for Terran ‘alien stories’ known with a sharp byline: ‘Just who do you think you are, calling us aliens?’ They became known as SAP-1.

Lee and Jenny are forced to react to massive personal change and profound friction, before building a core team including Arthur, Riona, and Yasmin to travel to Nova Britannia, an earth-similar world many parsecs away. Together, they must build a new nation and society from British and Irish settlers, complete their immense fifty-year Task, and live their renewed lives to the hilt.

Challenges aplenty stem from both the old world and new. They face the brutal reality of mid-21st-century geopolitics and the fight for diplomatic recognition on Terra, alongside a subtle ideological tension on the frontier; the environmental discipline of the Sustain Agenda, ‘It’s a new world, let's keep it nice,’ against the raw drive of the Pioneer Spirit, ‘Damn the rules, let the wagons roll!’

Will it lead to the greatest human empire two worlds have ever seen? Perhaps not as the ruthless empires of old were; a new dawn of federation and association, not annexation.