Lindsay Clarke's novel excited me more than any other English fiction for some time... John Fowles

....This dazzling novel left me stunned...a modern masterpiece... Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

........A splendid writer - a stylish, gripping story of alchemy across the ages... Sunday Express

In a personal letter to the author Ted Hughes wrote...

"I read your Chymical Wedding with a qualified eye. More or less in one go, I should say. And I'm awed by the web you've spun. Not only the beautiful complexeties of it but the fine texture of the threads ... the perfect balance of the total imaginative commitment to the alchymical material; on the one hand, and playful sceptical detachment on the other ... Full of wise things."

......Winner of the Whitbread Award for Fiction in 1989, this complex novel sets two inter-related stories on a collision course across time.
......After the collapse of his marriage early in the 1980s, the young poet, Alex Darken, retreats to a remote Norfolk village to lick his wounds. Soon after his arrival he is brought into a provocative encounter over a Tarot card with the much elder poet, Edward Nesbit, and his American lover Laura. Despite Edward's initial resistence, Laura recruits Alex's help in their search to unciver the secret behind events that had taken place in the same village in the middle of the previous century.
......The contemporary story is interwoven with the telling of the 19th Century story in which the Victorian alchemist, Sir Henry Agnew, and his brilliant daughter and assistant, Louisa, seek to share the wisdom of the Hermetic Tradition with a world that is falling deep into the accelerating tragedy of materialism. Both stories involve powerful emotional conflicts, both are driven by the power of dreams, and both take the form of quests to understand the mystery of the Chymical Wedding, by which opposing principles are brought into new creative relation and new possibilities for life emerge. By the end of the book it is as though the two stories are happening simultaneously, as each influences the unfolding of the other across time.

The interwoven mysteries of present and future climax with immense force and imagination, and bursts of astonishing beauty... The Times

....A triumphant assertion of humanity, thoughtful and hauntingly told... Scotland on Sunday

John Fowles wrote about Alice's Masque in The Spectator...

"Clarke is not like the others. He is serious, gifted, he believes in several things most of our sick world seems these days to ignore or despise. I shall continue to read his work with sympathy and interest."

......A contemporary version of The Wife of Bath's Tale in which the central male protagonist Ronan drives to Cornwall, hoping to persuade his lost lover, Leah, to come back to him. Around the time of his arrival, the body of a murdered girl is found in a nearby cove, and Ronan becomes a suspect in the murder-hunt.
......Injured by the failure of her relationship with Ronan, Leah has been living with a distant relative, Alice, who is now an old and successful tapestry-weaver. Having lived a turbulent life of her own, it is she who precipitates the process of psychic breakdown by which Ronan passes through a journey of ordeals into 'the otherworld'. Once there he finds himself the defendent in a Court of Love where the quest is for erotic justice, and when he emerges it is to the recognition that what he has really been looking for is the return of his long-lost soul.

An impressive first novel - it is skillfully constructed, economically written and ambitious in scope... TLS

....A novel admirably concerned with real issues - there is both passion and compassion... The Independent

........A unique blend of skillful writing and disturbing insights... The Irish Press

In a letter to the author, John Moat, poet and founder of the Arvon Foundation, wrote of Sunday Whiteman:

"I think it's a terrific and wonderful book - that moves on a Sibelius-like crescendo from start to finish. It's the sense of strength-in-reserve that so impresses me in Sunday Whiteman. The myth breathes out of the stark story - actually in a Conradian way, not that there's a hint of imitation. The story troubles one beautifully (some of the descriptive passages are hair-raisingly good), and then one finds that one's inhaled the myth."

......Short-listed for the Higham First Novel Prize in 1987, and set in the early 60s, this is an account of the collision between European and traditional African values in a newly independent West African state. A disturbing story, populated by a diverse cast of characters, and lit with flashes of humour, it tells of the efforts of Austin Palmer, a young English teacher based in an upcountry school, to rebuild his life after his wife, Kay, has left their marriage to return to England. Palmer's political idealism brings him into conflict with corrupt elements in the new regime, while his lover, the young, only half-educated African woman, Appea, increasingly finds herself hurt by his lack of emotional maturity. As Palmer's shallowly-rooted, overtly rational view of the world is interrogated by events, an unexpected encounter with a witch draws him deeper into the heart of Africa's darkness and into a fuller recognition of the darkness that lies in his heart too.