Drayton and MacKenzie

Shortlisted for the Tom Wolfe Prize for Fiction 2026

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice

“A big, bustling novel about love, friendship, money, ambition and the 21st century, packed with humor and intelligent observations . . . I finished it tear-stained.”—The Sunday Times (UK)

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 twenty-first century

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.