Sanderson’s Isle, the “gorgeous” (Rachael Allen) new novel by Betty Trask Prize-winning author James Clarke, has been reviewed by Buzz Magazine.

In the review, subtitled ‘A cinematic journey through psychedelic counterculture’ and which you can read in full here, Noel Gardner writes:

“Set at the end of the 1960s, with the schism between straight society and the substratum of psychedelic dropouts making for some uneasy culture clashing, Clarke’s pacing is shrewd and cinematic, his characters vivid and beguiling.”

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.