The Nexus

The Nexus, a novel by Carolyn Burns BassWhere the present meets the past at the gate of eternity.

If a bitter divorce wasn’t enough, losing a breast to cancer wounded the soul of medieval studies professor Aimee Burton more than it did her body. After a car accident, Aimee awakens on a forest road, attended to by a man in medieval garb. Aimee’s waking confusion becomes combative skepticism, until she accepts that she’s traveled back in time eight hundred years.

Sir Thomas, a Knight Templar jaded by the Crusades, hungers for meaning beyond the religiosity and violence of his order. His discovery of the mysterious woman Aimee arouses passion and purpose he thought purged by twenty years of monastic life.

As Sir Thomas tends to Aimee on the forest road he fears a brain fever compels Aimee’s ravings about being from the future. He takes her to the cottage of the wise-woman Bessie–mother of his childhood friend Brother Alfred and of Alis, the girl he had once hoped to marry.

Distraught over the fate of her teenage children, Aimee responds to Bessie’s loving touch and the kind ministrations of Brother Alfred. As she adjusts to life in the twelfth-century, Aimee confronts ghosts of her former life. Challenged by the spiritual tapestry of the twelfth century, feminist Aimee sorts through the tangled religiosity of the age and finds threads of authentic faith in the lives of Shadowhurst’s people.

A lifetime of bitterness and rivalry toward his elder brother, Edward, Earl of Willington, kept Sir Thomas away from Castle Shadowhurst for twenty years. At the request of his ailing mother Sir Thomas returns to Shadowhurst and is propelled into a deadly conspiracy between Saxons and Normans, brothers against brothers, which eventually enfolds the enigmatic Aimee.

The mystery of Aimee’s appearance in the world of Sir Thomas dominates the action, while layers of intrigue peel away to the fiery climax where Aimee and Sir Thomas discover the secret of the Nexus. A novel of hope and self-discovery, THE NEXUS is set in an age when strength and power, beauty and brilliance, forged razor edges of a cultural sword. Aimee and Sir Thomas embody the spirit of their prospective eras, but prove that love cannot be defined by culture or contained by time.

SORROWS END, a sequel to THE NEXUS, follows Aimee and Sir Thomas in further adventures, where history is written and revealed across a meridian of time.

THE NEXUS and SORROWS END are not yet published.