Dear readers, I love finding novels that deal substantively with money and with work; despite the centrality of those topics to our daily life, such books are all too rare. But to that small canon we can now add Alexander Starritt’s “Drayton and Mackenzie,” which was released in the United States this month. The book follows two Oxford graduates, James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie, who after a stint at McKinsey eventually go into business together, hoping to harvest energy from the tides off the Scottish coast. There’s a real idealism to them — Roland, in particular, is a dreamer — but the book takes the corporate world seriously. Starritt’s wit is deadly: The men concoct a plan for how McKinsey might approach education in a specific region of India, with an eye toward bigger changes across the country. “As for so many previous Englishmen,” Starritt writes, “it seemed so simple to alter the destiny of India.” The economy’s implosion in 2008 reroutes their plans, and the story later collides with Brexit and the pandemic. Intriguingly, real-life figures such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel appear. Ultimately, as our reviewer put it, the novel “has all the pleasures of a traditional, decades-spanning tale about individuals both caught up in and influencing history.” See you on Friday.
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