Two men. An unlikely friendship.
A plan that could change the world.

For the first time since university, James and Roland’s paths through life – one drawn in straight lines, the other squiggled and meandering – began to cross…

James Drayton has always found things too easy. By the time he leaves university, he’s still searching for a challenge worthy of his ambitions, one that will fulfil the destiny he thinks awaits him.

Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive risk-taker, a charismatic drifter with boundless enthusiasm but a knack for derailing his own attempts to get started in life.

When a chance encounter in a pub reunites these old acquaintances, it sets them on an unpredictable course through the upheavals of the 21st century, and triggers an unlikely alliance. Against the backdrop of the financial crash and its aftermath, they strive to create something that outlasts them, something that will matter.

Drayton and Mackenzie is a stunningly ambitious, immediately engaging and ultimately deeply moving novel both about trying to make your mark on the world, and about how a friendship might be the most important thing in life.

'Starritt's prose is riveting' NEW YORK TIMES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alexander Starritt’s 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 won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in the United States, and was nominated for the Prix Femina, Prix Medicis and Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. Drayton and Mackenzie is his third. Starritt was born and brought up in Scotland, and now lives in London.