I want to explain what Nonsuch Lure means. . .

"In the 1530s, King Henry VIII chose a site on the Surrey plain for the location of a magnificent hunting lodge. The lands were already owned by the Cuddington family, and had been for hundreds of years, but no matter -- King Henry annexed the entire village, along with a manor house, church, and priory, and had all the structures torn down to construct a Renaissance palace "as there would be none such in the land." The Cuddingtons were properly compensated for their troubles and given lands in Sussex in exchange. No doubt they were less than thrilled by this demonstration of the king's munificence!

Nonsuch Palace, which never merited more than a few visits by Henry VIII, proved more popular with his daughter, Elizabeth I. It remained standing until 1682. By this time it had fallen into the hands of Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, the notorious mistress of Charles II. Her gambling habits left her short of cash, so she had it demolished, the building materials sold to pay her debts.

Mary M. Luke's The Nonsuch Lure focuses not on the Tudors themselves, but on the Cuddingtons, the family dispossessed by the king's decision. It's a time-slip novel about star-crossed lovers, a beautiful 16th-century woman thought to be tainted by witchcraft, a curse that lasts over generations, and a mysterious lost treasure known only as the Lure. An irresistible combination for an escapist historical read.

The novel begins in the 1970s, as Andrew Moffatt, a wealthy American architect who spends his time jet-setting around the globe, comes across an old journal in a Virginia bookstore. Andrew gets caught up in reading the diary entries of Julian Cushing, a young teacher from colonial Williamsburg, who became so enraptured by a painting that it drew him across the Atlantic and to the ruins of Nonsuch Palace. Curious, Andrew travels to England to visit the Nonsuch excavation site, and finds that his life and Julian's are running in parallel. He begins seeing ghosts from the Tudor era, and there's an evil presence at Nonsuch that seems to have lingered..."


This was written by Sarah Johnson on her Reading the Past blog at: http://readingthepast.blogspot.com/2009/08/none-such-in-land.html Thanks, I could not quite find the words for this book, and you expressed it so beautifully. :-)

Those of you who have been following me on my original blog, may remember my first short story? "The Lure of the Phantom"? It was in part, inspired by this novel.