Sanderson’s Isle, the “engaging, inventive literary noir novel” (The Independent) by Betty Trask Prize-winning author James Clarke, has been praised in a review by Artless.

In the review, which you can read in full alongside a Q&A with James here, Mazin Saleem writes:

“Formally self-aware and sensitively drawn, modern and retro, socially realist and psychedelic like a collaboration between Ken Loach and Nicolas Roeg, this rake’s regress and northern noir novel about fate and hope will give you hope for the fate of the novel. Any good reader would be glad to have Tom speaking in their head.”

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.