Drayton and MacKenzie - by Alexander Starritt (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

Longlisted for the Financial Times and Schroders Business Book of the Year--the first work of fiction to grace the list in fifteen years--a sweeping social novel about an unlikely friendship between two men and a plan that could change the world, unfolding over the first two decades of the 21st century

"A big, bustling novel about love, friendship, money, ambition and the 21st century, packed with humor and intelligent observations . . . I finished it tear-stained." --Sunday Times

James and Roland's paths through life--one drawn in straight lines, the other looping and uncertain--began to cross...

James Drayton has always found things too easy. Ambitious, brilliant, disciplined--he graduates with a top first from Oxford and is on track to become the youngest ever partner at leading management consultancy McKinsey. His former classmate Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive dreamer: charming and restless, his boundless enthusiasm matched only by his knack for self-sabotage.

When Roland takes a job at the same firm as James, the two men only vaguely remember one another. But as the financial crisis starts to unfold, a chance encounter sparks an idea, and an unlikely partnership begins to take shape. Sent to Scotland to shutter offices and lay off hundreds of workers, James and Roland begin to wonder: What if they were made for more than this? What if they could build something grand and lasting--something that might even change the world?

By turns intimate and panoramic, Drayton and Mackenzie is a deeply intelligent novel about ambition, friendship, and the forces shaping the twenty-first century - the story of two men caught in, and determined to master, the tides of history.

Review Quotes

"A romp through the 21st century via two bright young people--but beyond all the money and success Drayton and Mackenzie is really about friendship." --Laura Hackett, Sunday Times

"A big, bustling novel about love, friendship, money, ambition and the 21st century, packed with humour and intelligent observations... picture Great Expectations meets The Big Short... I finished it tear-stained... An epic tale of ambition and male friendship." --Sunday Times

"Will have you hooked... an ode to the enduring power of male friendship." --The Times Best Summer Books

"A heart-warming story of a friendship that is very much of its times." --Mail on Sunday

"Drayton and Mackenzie is simultaneously a breathtaking conspectus of the 21st century, an exciting rags-to-riches adventure and a deeply moving story of male friendship. A novel has not done so much so well since Michael Chabon's friendship epic, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay... the real delight of Drayton and Mackenzie is the relationship of its leads. This evolves as you'd expect--beginning in incomprehension and developing into something unbreakable--yet is so beautifully done, I'll admit my vision wasn't the clearest by the end. (Seriously, if you thought Andrew O'Hagan's Mayflies was sad . . .) I don't know how Starritt is going to top this one." --Financial Times

"An epic masterpiece encompassing some of the most pivotal points of our century ... a powerful, poignant and frequently funny rags-to-riches adventure that plunges readers to the seabed off Orkney before blasting into the stars above Sutherland." --Sunday Post

"Outstanding... James Drayton is a powerhouse brain unable to connect with others, while Roland Mackenzie is charm-positive but can't quite get his act together. Without ever really intending, they entwine their lives to defy their business detractors, create an extraordinary friendship and pursue the enigma of tidal power to a pioneering conclusion. A novel like no other--awards await." --Strong Words

"One of Starritt's many skills is how he ratchets up the poignancy, creating real characters rather than caricatures." --The Spectator

"Deft and engaging... A thoughtful study of male friendship." --Evening Standard

"I could not put it down... This gripping story raises a question: Why are so few business novels being written?" --Adrian Wooldridge, Bloomberg

"Alexander Starritt can write as elegantly as Alan Hollinghurst and as fluently as Jonathan Coe. It is the prose that keeps us turning the pages of this epic novel of friendship and twenty-first-century life." --TLS

"My book of the summer... this tale of two very different young men who together build a company is sweeping, clever, deeply researched and very funny... It is also that rare thing, a book that is positive (but clear-eyed) about those fashionably maligned beings, men." --Janice Turner, The Times

"A warmly comic saga of male friendship... This tale of two entrepreneurs dips into the perspectives of real-life tech moguls, with thrilling results." --Guardian

"Drawn with amazing realism and detail... making the sweep of history profoundly personal; Drayton and Mackenzie is the story of two men, but also of the era they inhabit." --Irish Times

About the Author

Alexander Starritt was born in Scotland in 1985. His debut novel The Beast was a 2017 Spectator book of the year; his second novel, We Germans, was published in 2020 and translated into six languages. It was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in the United States, and nominated for the Prix Femina, Prix Medicis, and Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France.