RELIGIOUS fundamentalism, the mystery of the New World and the impending English Civil War are used as the background to a new novel by an East Sheen writer.

Christie Dickason's The Memory Palace is a lavish historical thriller following the tragic romance between separated lovers as they struggle to survive and be reunited.

In England in 1639, Zeal Beaster is at the end of her tether. The mistress of a burnt-out country estate, she is pregnant with an illegitimate child and has been abandoned by her lover, who was forced to flee to the New World. Zeal plans to kill herself before Gifford, the local hell-fire minister, can bring down God’s judgement on her depravity.

Then Philip Wentworth, an aging soldier and adventurer, offers her another way out, but his terms hide both troubling pleasures and unsuspected treachery.

Buffeted by a swirl of emotions and events, Zeal rebuilds her destroyed house. But the new house, the Memory Palace, with its hidden secrets, subterranean theatre, automata and mazes, becomes the map of her heart’s complex journey through the many different aspects of love and betrayal.

Filled with light, rich images, imagination and healing music, the Memory Palace also becomes, ultimately, Zeal’s weapon against religious fundamentalism, in the battle of the human spirit to survive in troubled times.

Rich in loving detail of an England about to vanish forever into the chaos of the Civil War and in mysterious tales of a still-mythical New World, The Memory Palace tells of the sheer danger of being a woman alone in days of violent political and religious unrest. And always, there is the unexpected enemy at the centre of the maze, with only death in mind.

Christie Dickason was born in America but also lived as a child in Thailand, Mexico and Switzerland, before settling in England. Harvard-educated, and a former theatre director and choreographer (with the Royal Shakespeare Company and at Ronnie Scott’s among others), Christie has written professionally since the 1980s - novels, play scripts and libretti. She now lives with her husband in East Sheen.

The Memory Palace was launched at Waterstones in Richmond, where the author signed copies and actor Gary Waldhorn - David Horton in the Vicar of Dibley - read out an extract.