Sanderson’s Isle, the brand-new novel by Betty Trask Prize-winning author James Clarke, has been praised in a review by The Guardian.

In the review, which you can read in full here, Toby Litt writes of Sanderson’s Isle: “a total trip… A fugitive seeks refuge in a 1960s commune in the Lake District, in an energetic novel that captures an era”; while he describes Sanderson as “the kind of charismatic surname-bearing Mephistopheles that JG Ballard’s heroes often encounter at the start of their adventures”.

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 is out now. Grab your copy here or, better, via your local bookshop or Bookshop.org.