This is a big book in every sense. It describes the emerging friendship and ongoing partnership between James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie who meet at university and go on to become highly successful businessmen. The strength of the novel is how it is set against the background of 21st-century Economics and the ups and downs of high finance.

James and Roland make an unlikely pair. James is highly focused and pursues his aims relentlessly while Roland is easy going and easily distracted. The sense that opposites attract is possibly overplayed and, at times, their relationship slips into what might be termed the homoerotic! As they climb the tree of global capitalism they meet famous, and ‘real’, people which provides a sense of reality but it makes you wonder whether Elon Musk is really like that!

The scale of the story is almost Dickensian cascading through twenty years of radical Economic change and these changes are reflected in the relationship between the friends. Perhaps the story flags a little towards the end as a girlfriend and, later, wife is introduced, and time appears more compressed as events run on.

Anyway, it is an enjoyable read even if you think that these characters were born with silver spoons in their mouths and were, in one sense, doomed to succeed!

(Drayton and Mackenzie is published by Swift Press. Thanks to the publishers and to NetGalley for an advance copy.)