Drayton and Mackenzie tells the story of Roland Mackenzie and James Drayton, students who meet at university whilst in the same rowing team but who drift apart shortly after. As the years roll by Roland and James begin to collide with increasing frequency until they begin to collaborate on a shared job at the same firm. It's the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

There was something about these two that drew me in. It does evolve very slowly and took me a little time to truly fall for this unlikely pair but I devoured the novel and by the end, feeling utterly wrung out, I could barely put it down.

Alexander Starritt has given us two disparate but wonderful characters. The basis of their story is akin to that of Zuckerberg and Savarin as they began Facebook, but in the renewable energy/engineering sphere.

You don't need to know anything about scientific breakthroughs or anything engineering based. I don't and it all made sense to me. There's several cameo appearances by politicians and tech giants which gives the narrative a feeling of reality. The characters of Drayton and Mackenzie are very different but they are both very likeable. By the end of the book I was heavily invested in their friendship.

An excellent novel. I loved it. If you like a buddy book with several twists and turns thrown in or you just enjoy a really well written novel about the state of the world in the past 20 years you'll love this.

Thankyou to Netgalley and Swift Press for the advance review copy. Most appreciated.

This book is really hare to review as while I never wanted to stop reading, at times I found it very dense and impenetrable.
It’s also incredibly long which I didn’t realise until I felt like I’d read for hours and saw my kindle barely move more than a few percent.

I have absolutely no interest in marine energy. I have no interest in finance. I have no interest in investments or Silicon Valley and definitely not Peter Theil. I skimmed a lot of the marine energy bits and a lot on the financial crash.

But I kept reading because I really loved the character and wanted to know what they would do next. Especially Roland. Roland was great fun.

But both characters are incredible well-realised. I felt like I knew them. It’s a shame some of the more minor characters like Alan, Mary Rose and especially Alice didn’t get more of this development.

But I didn’t stop reading. Even when I realised it was 500+ pages.

I didn’t love the ending and I wanted more from the epilogue but I really enjoyed spending time with these guys.

There was a point when I wondered where this tale of an unusual friendship between two unlikely characters was going. I found the opening chapters rather slow and lacking in direction. About a third of the way in, I was fully engaged and thoroughly committed to sharing this friendship, the families, friends and colleagues. The dialogue is vital and inviting, filled with banter and deeper observations as the friends meet challenges to their business partnership. I so enjoyed the insight into the banking crisis, how venture capital works – and how the taps are turned on and off! – and the creation of a legacy industry interwoven with this multilayered story of the gift of genuine friendship.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an advance copy of this book.

This is a great book. OK, it's a bit dull early on with all the stuff about the Bear bank going bust etc., and Lehmann Bros and OK, it's a long book but it is a 5 star read.

It doesn't take long to get immersed in the lives of James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie. Their friendship is such a great thing and so well described. I felt I was living their lives with them. Each of them is a loveable character, very different from each other but such great friends, each bringing to the other qualities that the other lacks.

Roland can be very funny, he is irrepressible with his dreams of Japan and his mother from Inverness, his restlessness, people skills, warmth and teasing of James. "Everyone loves Roland" and I loved him too but I also loved James. James is a visionary, confident in many ways but able to identify areas in which he is not so strong (people skills for example) and so determined to try and improve himself.

Andy, a supporting character is very believable too. On occasion I felt that the author was being a bit cheeky, if generally accurate, about Scots but he was born in Scotland so he's allowed. I was not keen on Alice or what happened but no spoilers!

There is a lot of humour and banter in the book and a lot of dry remarks.

I could hardly bear to read the bit set in the Covid pre-vaccination period. It was painful and moved me to tears. From that moment on, everything is bittersweet and the author writes very movingly about loss how the feelings linger on and on. Good epilogue too, to round things off.

there were lots of moments that let me to think in this book. some "life" questions shall we say. it was very real and authentic and although fiction it felt like we could be following some very real characters alongside some realistic issue of their time and ours.
its a slower take on a lot of topics and themes our two are facing both in work and home and in themselves. our two main characters are seemingly very opposite. but when the two meet its a start of something which seems to keep them meeting. coincidence? perhaps not when they find themselves together in a relentless and hard task in the financial crisis which leads them to needing a breaking, taking a hike and wondering whether to join forces both bringing something the other needs to the table.
it was good to read something of a male friendship in this book. i often here woman talk of "what is it with male friendships?" lol. it looks totally different on the outside to most female ones. on coming home you can ask a male what him and his male friend did and then talked about and the answers are sometimes so comical. and then you get the moments of deep empathy and connection like in this book and it seems more touching and something we need to see more of described in these snippets of life type books.
i found the look into the business world alongside it only helped to add weight to what we saw from each characters. and then to their friendship which both eased and endured some pretty harsh time.
i different book for me and i enjoyed reading it.

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.

I'll be honest — I struggled with this book at times. For me, it isn’t fast-paced; it’s more of a slow burn. There’s a lot of character development and detailed discussion of the business world, including the financial crisis. It’s a subtle and restrained novel, and many readers will appreciate that. The friendship between the two main characters is central to the story, as is the search for authenticity — in relationships, in work, and in the pursuit of meaning in life. I received an advanced review copy from NetGalley and this is my honest review.

Opening in the early 2000s, Alexander Starritt’s novel follows James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie who bump into each other a couple of years after graduating from Oxford. Driven and intensely competitive, even with himself, James is the affable, indolent Roland’s antithesis. He’s a rising star with McKinsey, eyes set on becoming their youngest partner; Roland joins him, getting in by the skin of his teeth. When the 2008 crash hits, they’re sent off to Aberdeen to prepare employees for a swathe of redundancies in the hard-hit oil and gas industry. As a breather from their relentless delivery of bad news, James suggests a weekend mountaineering which becomes more about drinking than climbing beginning a friendship that will underpin the rest of their lives, and a business partnership in which one will complement the other.
Drayton and Mackenzie is unusual in two respects: the theme of enduring male friendship and its setting in the business world. The latter might sound dull but I found this story of ambition, determination and invention quite riveting. It reminded me of State of Happiness, a Norwegian TV series which told the story of the rise of the oil business and through it, modern Norway. Starritt does something similar through James and Roland whose pursuit of the development of renewable energy charts the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Roland and James’s friendship may seem unlikely, but it’s entirely believable, growing deeper with adversity. It’s a tribute to Starritt’s storytelling skills and characterisation that he’s succeeded in making a story of business and entrepreneurship both gripping and enjoyable.