Sanderson’s Isle, the trippy new novel by Betty Trask Prize-winning author James Clarke, has been praised as “a magnificent experience” by Wendy Erskine, author of Dance Move.

Erskine writes:

“Psychedelic 1960s London, TV personalities, counterculture in the Lake District, a lost child! Wasn’t I always going to want read this book? And what a magnificent experience it is in its rendering of isolation and belonging, its precise evocation of place and time.  Speake is a terrific narrator and Clarke a compelling writer.”

James’s third novel after The Litten Path and Hollow in the Land, Sanderson’s Isle follows one man’s journey through swinging London and the Lake District in the psychedelic 1960s.

Young, troubled factotum Thomas Speake rolls into a grimy 1960s London to search for his estranged father. Instead, he finds a surrogate – the eccentric, drug-addled TV presenter Joseph Sanderson, who covers Britain’s shifting demographics in its most transitional decade.

When a member of Sanderson’s entourage asks Speake for help finding her missing stepdaughter, last seen in a mysterious commune in the Lake District, the pair venture into Cumbria’s brutal landscape. Will Speake find the purpose he’s desperately seeking, or will things end with the violence that pursues him?

Sanderson’s Isle will be released in hardback in the UK on 6th July 2023. Pre-order your copy here now.