Sanderson's Isle

More about the book

Speake comes to London in 1969 to look for the father he has never known. He finds Sanderson instead, a larger-than-life TV presenter who hosts 'midweek madness' parties at his house 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, a member of a hippie cult rumoured to be living off-grid in the Lake District. Forced to lie low after a violent outburst, Speake joins Sanderson on a tour of the Lake District, where he's researching his TV series and a tie-in book, Sanderson's Isle. Both men become fascinated by rumours of the cult, and decide to go in search of them. Amid the fierce beauty of the mountains, the cult is making a new kind of life, living to rules the square world can't understand. There its members are forming the kind of community that Speake - a drifter who belongs nowhere - is desperate to find, but has been sent to betray.