Betty Trask Prize-winning author James Clarke‘s forthcoming novel, Sanderson’s Isle, has been praised in a review by Desmond Bullen of Northern Soul.

In the review, which you can read in full here, Bullen writes:

“Tom Speake, the protagonist of Sanderson’s Isle, James Clarke’s grand tour of the anticlimactic final year of the 1960s, is hamstrung on a similar dilemma, torn between finding himself in a search for the father he never knew, or outrunning who he is and the collateral damage that comes of his self-absorption. Standing at the periphery of things, observing from the margins with all the bitterness of the disappointed romantic, his closest kin are more ink and paper than flesh and blood; Meursault in Albert Camus’ L’Étranger, or The Outsider Colin Wilson identified himself as being.”

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 13th July 2023. Pre-order your copy here now.