To those of us who grew up reading a whole slew of dubious books about lost continents and fabled civilisations, Lemuria was on a par with Mu and Atlantis. However, where Mu was largely a creation of James Churchward, the less familiar Lemuria was at least equal in mystery and heritage to Atlantis. As Atlantis was one of the stars of the Western occult tradition, so Lemuria had been adopted and adapted by Theosophists from the mythology of Southern India. During the 19th century, Lemuria was thought to be a land-bridge between India and Africa, or possibly extending south from India towards Antarctica, but it disappeared like its Atlantic counterpart beneath the waves (some tens of thousands of years BC).

The author - a professor of history at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor - explains that her main thesis is about cultural loss and disenchantment: as modern scientific and intellectual rationalisation of the sciences "disavows truths that once mattered and discards wonders that had once captivated, the world is leached of magic, mystery and marvel." She proposes that preoccupation with such loss "manifests itself in the fascination with vanished homelands, hidden civilisations and forgotten peoples" and that this has shown up in poetics, politics, ideologies and even sciences.

In this remarkable and fascinating study, Ramaswamy follows the fortunes of this lost world, its champions and those who sought to disenchant its believers, in what she calls their "labors of loss".

Lemuria was, Ramaswamy argues, many things to many people at different times, but all agree that it was a palaso-world, "a land before our time, where forests loomed large and dinosaurs roamed" - a place that Michel Meurger would call a "mythological landscape" - shaped by the very human imaginative need for such a place.