Drayton and Mackenzie

I’ll admit, I rolled my eyes at first. *Another* novel about privileged men navigating life? But *Drayton and Mackenzie* disarmed me within an hour—not with grand gestures, but with the way Starritt nails the tiny, cumulative betrayals of long-term friendship. The audiobook’s opening, with Saward’s Drayton delivering a drunken, self-aggrandizing toast at a wedding, is a masterclass in vocal acting. You can *hear* the liquor sloshing, the performative charm, the underlying desperation. By contrast, his later scenes, where Drayton’s voice cracks over a voicemail left at 3 a.m., are devastating precisely because Saward never oversells the emotion. The novel’s structure—jumping between timelines—could feel gimmicky, but the audiobook’s production leans into it. A subtle shift in Saward’s tone (a tighter British clip for the Oxford years, a looser, more nasal drawl for the hedge-fund era) keeps you oriented without heavy-handed signposting. My only gripe? The female characters often feel like satellites orbiting the central friendship, their interior lives sketched in broad strokes. And while the satire of London’s financial elite lands, a few set pieces (a yacht scene, a disastrous dinner party) teeter into *Succession*-lite territory. Yet the final act, where the two men confront each other in a half-empty pub, is so painfully authentic—thanks in large part to Saward’s ability to make silence *sound* loaded—that I forgave the earlier indulgences. This isn’t a book about likable people, but it *is* about recognizable ones. If you’ve ever scrolled through old photos of a friend you no longer know, this will gut you.