Betty Trask Prize-winning author James Clarke has been interviewed by Rippling Pages podcast about his brand-new novel, Sanderson’s Isle, which he describes as a “blackly comic existential thriller” that explores “the essential tragic solitude of our condition”.

In the interview with Liam Bishop, which you can listen to in full here, James discusses the inspirations behind his characters Thomas Speake and Sanderson, including 60s counterculture and psychedelia, as well as the novel’s themes, from identity and expression, to isolation and belonging, to the city and the country.

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.