It’s unusual to read a book which explores and celebrates male friendship with all its affectionate joshing, trust and respect. We’re so used to reading about male/female liaison in its many forms and/or about gay love that pure, loving friendship between two men is a refreshing change.

Alexander Starritt’s new novel, which is both moving and  absorbing, gives us James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie who meet at Oxford and are very different. James is a focused, super-bright, high achiever who doesn’t always relate comfortably to other people. Roland has people skills, enjoys a good time and messes up his degree. So they hardly notice each other. Later they meet again, find a bond and start an innovative energy company – it has potential, perhaps, but of course investment is an issue and there are many setbacks. Some of the stumbling blocks are driven by phases of differing commitment and loyalty as the novel inches, via its dated sections, towards the Covid years. The complementary relationship between the two of them is like a love affair as they bicker, fall out and rediscover each other repeatedly. Rarely have I read a novel with stronger characterisation.

The minor characters are wonderful too. James’s long-suffering parents, with whom he lives most of the time, are a delight. Both are academics. They take in Roland as a quasi family member and Arthur’s therapeutic, culinary hobby saves the day on more than one occasion. Then there’s Eleni, a rich successful Greek they knew at university who can always be relied on for sensible advice. Alice goes out with James for a while but Roland is easier to be with and, somehow, the two men come round to accommodating the change in dynamic. Some of the characters are real too. It must have been fun to write Drayton and Mackenzie’s meeting with Elon Musk.

Is there a future in tidal energy or hydrolisers? I’m no scientist but Starritt, who has clearly researched it all pretty scrupulously, convinces me that there probably is although there are many heart-in-mouth moments at the beginning, not least when the diver descends to attach the first cable. Starritt is very good at tension and brilliant at naturalistic dialogue.  He also excels at the agony of loss because, of course, life is messy – in novels as in reality.

The novel’s epilogue pitches us forward twenty years so we do actually find out how successful it eventually all was. And I cried. Drayton and Mackenzie –  the book’s title is, of course, the name of the company –  got under my skin in a way that no recent novel has done for a while. It’s intelligent and compelling without ever resorting to shallow literary pretentiousness. I loved it – and wondered why on earth it isn’t on the 2025 Booker Prize longlist.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Stalin: the Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Chris Power’s 2021, debut novel came to my attention because I recently interviewed Chris, in his 2025 Booker Prize judge capacity, for a magazine. I try to be polite and conscientious so I thought it behoved me to read A Lonely Man before speaking to its author. I had no idea what to expect. In the event it was a delightful surprise which I admired very much – apart from the ending of which more anon.

Robert, who is an author, lives in Berlin with his wife and two young daughters. They also have a lakeside house in her native Sweden. Places are sensuously evoked in this intriguing novel and it is clear that Chris knows them well.

Robert meets another Brit, Patrick, who is also a writer. Incrementally, during a series of furtive meetings, Patrick, anxious and capricious, tells Robert an extraordinary story about being commissioned to ghost-write the memoir of a Russian oligarch who then dies –  officially by suicide but actually under suspicious, hushed-up circumstances. Robert doesn’t really believe a word of it but sees it as a good plot for his new novel which has been proving elusive. Thus, Patrick’s story, as told by Robert who adds fictional detail forms chunks of Chris’s novel. Still with me? In effect it means that A Lonely Man is a story, within a story within a story like a set of Russian dolls. It’s a clever page turner.

The point really, I suppose, is to investigate the nature of truth which isn’t as absolute as it might seem, and perhaps should be, in a world in which people routinely now say “my truth” when they mean “my point of view” or “my interpretation. The word is now often pluralised these days too as in “their truths”. How much truth is there in what Patrick is telling Robert? The reader can see past Robert and begins to suspect that at least some of it might be true. Patrick is very jumpy and moody – and furious when he learns that Robert is “stealing” his story without telling him. There is strong evidence that he is followed on more than one occasion and soon there are some sinister, knowing messages and phone calls.

Finally … well of course I’m not going to spoil the ending for you but we do actually learn, by inference, whether or not Patrick’s story is the fabrication of a clinically disturbed man or whether any of it is true. Or maybe Robert is fantasising as he writes and we are deliberately left to decide for ourselves? Either way It’s all comes to an abrupt stop, and feels like a cop-out by someone who didn’t really know how to conclude his novel. Bit disappointing than, at the last, although I enjoyed it until the final page.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt

My attention was drawn to this 2025 title by a relative who spotted it in a Kent bookshop and thought I might be interested. So – you know me – three clicks and I was in.

And it’s fascinating to read a non-fiction book of this sort when we’re all still trying to make sense of the The Salt Path debacle. David Whitehouse puts his authorial cards firmly and unequivocally on the table. He tells us he has changed some, but not all, names – as we all have to when writing about real people and situations –  but that otherwise his book is the unvarnished truth. Towards the end, he also explains, within the narrative, that he has had to fictionalise not only the name but other details about one individual because she is famous and identifying her would compromise other people’s right to anonymity. Fair enough.

A woman named Caroline Lane lived in a mansion block in Margate. Then, unaccountably, in 2009 she vanished. Her flat was as she left it. The neighbours were puzzled and concerned although Caroline had always – with her forthright ways – been seen as  standoffish.  A few days before her – departure? death? kidnapping? – she had, according to the minutes, upset several people at a residents’ meeting. What on earth had happened to her?

Whitehouse stumbled across this story while having his hair cut in a very ordinary Margate salon at a time when he needed a new project. So he decided to investigate Caroline and her disappearance. He is very good at Margate itself, a town whose fortunes have gone up and down dramatically in the last 40 years or so – from the trendy Turner Contemporary and the coffee shops of the old town, to the run-down immigrant-housing hotels and the lacklustre town centre, long since deserted by most big name retailers. Like Whitehouse, I have long associations with Kent. I lived for nearly 40 years in Sittingbourne. I know the places he writes about well and admire the way he brings them to life as he talks to residents and uses all his research skills to trace Caroline, whose flat is eventually compulsorily purchased and her belongings disposed of.

Saltwater Mansions is a subtle mixture of memoir and reportage because woven into the mix is Whitehouse’s own family background. It is sub-titled “The Woman Who Disappeared and Other Untold Stories” and it does what it says on the tin. His long suffering wife Lou with whom he has two sons, tries to be patient with his Caroline obsession but it sometimes wears thin. Like many of us, he wishes desperately he’d coaxed his own father to talk about the past and the little he knows becomes  one of the book’s “untold stories”. The concept also gives him the scope for several fascinating digressions into the histories of some of the people he meets along the way. Beth and Jon, for example, who are the eventual new occupants of Caroline’s flat have a moving “back story”.  Beth’s mother Rosa, was a single parent, a professional singer and afflicted by cystic fibrosis which she managed to defy for many years. Her daughter had a rackety, penurious childhood which eventually took them to Margate because it was cheap. There, while still a teenager, she met Jon. It’s a powerful amd moving sub-story in which Whitehouse gives sympathetic heft to all characters.

In the end he does “find” Caroline – sort of. But this is reflective non-fiction not a novel so there is no tidy conclusion. It is, however, a beautifully written page turner. I enjoyed it very much, just as my neice-in-law, a fellow bibliophile,  guessed that I would.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: A Lonely Man by Chris Power

Last month I spent a pleasant weekend in North Yorkshire, staying with an old friend. The night before my arrival she had been to a talk in a Thirsk bookshop at which Carol Drinkwater promoted her new novel.  And my friend talked quite a lot about the event over the weekend. She had, naturally, also bought a signed copy of One Summer in Provence which was lying on her coffee table. I then ordered it because it looked like an entertaining summer read.

Now for those of you who are – ahem – too young to remember: Carol Drinkwater was the actor who played Helen Herriot in the early episodes of the BBC’s adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small in the late 1970s and early 1980s. And given that James Herriot’s semi-fictionalised Darrowby was really Thirsk, she could hardly have been in a more appropriate place when my friend heard her.  Married to a French TV producer, Carol Drinkwater has lived in Provence for many years.

And I was right about this novel. It is comforting without being cloying, presents characters you really care about and I liked the celebration of family – irrespective of the form it takes.

Celia, a former actor, and her playwright husband, Dominic, have a small but successful wine-producing estate in Provence. Yes, to some extent, Drinkwater is clearly drawing on her own experience and , of course, she really knows the vegetation, views, smells, sounds and people of the place she’s writing about. It’s a richly convincing and stunningly beautiful backdrop – even when storms and rain cause serious damage to the grape crop and injure two people. But this isn’t a Katie Fforde-style romantic escape, there is a dark undercurrent which keeps you turning the pages. The prologue, which lurks at the back of your mind as you read on, signals that all cannot possibly be as it seems.

At the heart of this story is a parentage revelation. And if that isn’t one of the seven stories we’re told dominate all fiction then it must be the eighth because it crops up so often in all literary genres and periods. It’s what I call “sua madre, suo padre” after that hilarious moment and ensuing aria in The Marriage of Figaro when Figaro learns who his parents are. Of course there are many variations on the theme – one of which is the sustaining thread in this novel – when David contacts Celia and brings his daughter to stay on her estate. Is he who he says he is? Dominic, in particular, is sceptical.

We also long to know what exactly happened to Celia and Dominic ten years earlier before they left London. Tantalising hints lead, eventually, to our finding out and understanding why Celia remains so edgy. And then eventually … but I’ll spare you the spoilers.

It’s a novel with a large and memorable cast.  Gillian, David’s daughter, is a gloriously colourful character – rude, vulnerable, feisty and artistically very talented. Tom, the musician who comes to provide casual summer labour is a delight. So is Henri, an elderly local who keeps bees and refuses to retire. And Dominic is a complex man:  an intelligent realist, tending to irrascibilty but deeply in love with Celia and very excited when he suddenly gets a big Netflix job.

Two parties, one at the beginning in the garden when Celia’s anxious bustling about beforehand reminded me of Mrs Dalloway, and the other towards the end on the beach, bring people together which is convenient for the plot.  They also allow Drinkwater to evoke the Provencal ambience – and she excels at that.

It’s a good read. Put it on your pool/beach/garden pile.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Saltwater Mansions by David Whitehouse