Betty Trask Prize-winning author James Clarke will be discussing his brand-new novel, Sanderson’s Isle, at Blackwell’s Bookshop, Manchester, from 6.00pm on Wednesday 26th July.

“Set in swinging London and the Lake District during the 1960s, and filled with gorgeous nature writing of the urban and the rural, Sanderson’s Isle is an electrifying novel portraying the moment when British society was unsettled and transformed by the counterculture. James will be in conversation with his editor Luke Brown, publishing director of Serpent’s Tail, who is a novelist in his own right (Theft and My Biggest Lie) as well as a lecturer in creative writing at University of Manchester, and who, like James, grew up in Lancashire.”

To find out more, including how to book your place, see here.

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.