James Drayton has always found things too easy. By the time he leaves university, he’s still waiting for a challenge worthy of his ambitions. Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive risk-taker, a charismatic drifter with 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 twenty-first century and sparks an unlikely alliance. Sent to Aberdeen during the financial crisis to lay off hundreds of workers, James and Roland begin to wonder: what if they were made for more than this? What if together they could build something grand and lasting – something that might even change the world?Drayton and Mackenzie is a novel that is by turns intimate and sweeping, and highly intelligent, exploring ambition, friendship and the forces shaping our twenty-first century.