Sandersons Isle
By (Author) James Clarke
Profile Books Ltd
Serpent's Tail
3rd October 2023
13th July 2023
Main
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Fiction and Related items
Fiction: general and literary
823.92
Hardback
320
Width 142mm, Height 218mm, Spine 36mm
440g
1969. Thomas Speake comes to London to look for his father but finds Sanderson instead, a larger-than-life TV presenter who hosts 'midweek madness' parties where the punch is spiked with acid. There Speake meets Marnie and promises to help her find her adoptive child, who has been taken by her birth mother to live off-grid in a hippie commune in the Lake District.
Forced to lie low after a violent accident, Speake joins Sanderson on a tour of the Lake District, where he's researching a book to accompany his popular TV series, Sanderson's Isle. Fascinated by local rumours about the hippies, Sanderson joins the search for their whereabouts. Amid the fierce beauty of the mountains, the cult is forming the kind of community that Speake - a drifter who belongs nowhere - is desperate to find but has been sent to betray.
This is the follow up to James Clarke's Betty Trask Prize-winning debut novel. It is filled with gorgeous nature writing of the urban and the rural, and its portrayal of the moment when British society was unsettled and transformed by the counterculture of the 1960s is visionary and electrifying.
'Sanderson's Isle is a hugely enjoyable sex and drug fuelled human drama, set against the gritty backdrops of 1960's London and the Lake District. Clarke's vivid writing brings his characters fully to life, each one grappling in their own way with the social turbulence at the dawn of the space age. A powerful and deeply engaging read' - Lee Schofield, author of Wild Fell
'What a narrator. How Speake speaks. How he bends your ear, and your heart. Sanderson's Isle sometimes reads like a lost John Braine or David Storey novel. There's even a touch of Ted Lewis in its elemental fatalism. It's that good' - Tom Benn, author of Oxblood
'Praise for James Clarke' - :
'His prose is generous and electrifying, unjudgemental and assured. A brilliant new talent' - Colin Barrett
'A magic portrayal of life in the peripheries' - Amy Liptrot
James Clarke was born in Manchester in 1985 and grew up in the Rossendale Valley, Lancashire. His debut novel The Litten Path won the 2019 Betty Trask Prize.