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

In the review, which subscribers can read in full here, Neil Hegarty writes:

“Freewheeling, vivid, and intensely imagined, Sanderson’s Isle creates a portrait of a nation – but what a portrait is offered up here by James Clarke, and what a nation… although set 50 years and more ago, Sanderson’s Isle has a decidedly contemporary flavour: it is a letter of love to another England, one that has long been marginalised, brutalised and effectively silenced.”

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.