For the first time since university, James and Roland’s paths through life – one drawn in straight lines, the other squiggled and meandering – began to cross?

James Drayton has always found things too easy. By the time he leaves university, he’s still searching for a challenge worthy of his ambitions, one that will fulfil the destiny he thinks awaits him.

Roland Mackenzie, on the other hand, is an impulsive risk-taker, a charismatic drifter with boundless enthusiasm but 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 21st century, and triggers an unlikely alliance. Against the backdrop of the financial crash and its aftermath, they strive to create something that outlasts them, something that will matter.

Drayton and Mackenzie is a stunningly ambitious, immediately engaging and ultimately deeply moving novel both about trying to make your mark on the world, and about how a friendship might be the most important thing in life.

THE MUCH-ANTICIPATED NOVEL FROM AN AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR

CAN FRIENDSHIPS CHANGE THE WORLD?

‘Starritt’s daring work challenges us to lay bare our histories, to seek answers from the past, and to be open to perspectives starkly different from our own’ New York Times

When a young British man asks his German grandfather what it was like to fight on the wrong side of the war, the question is initially met with irritation and silence. But after the old man’s death, a long letter to his grandson is found among his things.

That letter is this book. In it, he relates the experiences of an unlikely few days on the Eastern Front – at a moment when he knows not only that Germany is going to lose the war, but that it deserves to. He writes about his everyday experience amid horror, confusion and great bravery, and he asks himself what responsibility he bears for the circumstances he found himself in. As he tries to find an answer he can live with, we hear from his grandson what kind of man he became in the seventy years after the war.

We Germans is a fundamentally human novel that grapples with the most profound of questions about guilt, shame and responsibility – questions that remain as live today as they have always been.