In this episode of Lit with Charles, I speak with Alexander Starritt, author of the novels We Germans (2020) and Drayton and Mackenzie (2024).

We Germans is a devastatingly humane wartime confession: an elderly German writes a long letter to his British grandson about serving on the Eastern Front, with the grandson’s present-day interjections sharpening the moral contrasts between war and ordinary life. Drayton and Mackenzie is a rare, gripping business novel that follows two friends from graduation into the high-stakes world of building a clean-energy company, where private choices collide with macro forces - finance cycles, technology, and industrial realities.

We talk about structure (letters, interjections, and the occasional omniscient lens), how fiction can engage with the “big stuff” shaping our lives (economics, climate, technology), why industrial solutions - not apps - sit at the core of decarbonisation, and how character is revealed gradually, the way real people change. We also explore Alexander’s rural upbringing, German heritage, and the literary influences that inform his work - from Larkin’s melancholy clarity to Tolstoy’s vast social canvas.

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Alexander Starritt’s four picks were:

• “Dockery and Son,” by Philip Larkin (1964)

• The Shipping News, by Annie Proulx (1993)

• Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford (2010)

• War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (1869)