Male friendship in fiction

Cover image for Drayton and Mackenzie

Drayton and Mackenzie by Alexander Starritt: The odd couple

I’ve had several successes with Swift Press, notably Ben Shattuck’s The History of Sound, one of last year’s favourites, enough to keep an eye on their upcoming titles. Alexander Starritt’s Drayton and Mackenzie is very different. Opening in the early 2000s, it follows James Drayton and Roland Mackenzie whose chance meeting a couple of years […]

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Cover image for The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti

The Eight Mountains by Paolo Cognetti (transl. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre): Enduring friendship

I wrote a post about friendship a little while ago, part of my Five Books I’ve Read series, beginning it by saying how few novels there seemed to be about friendship, and fewer still about male friendship, at least in my reading experience. Paolo Cognetti’s The Eight Mountains offers a corrective to that. At its

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