Celebrating 10 years of the Booker Prize Shortlisted His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet

Posted on October 1, 2025

This Autumn marks 10 years since the first publication of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s critically acclaimed, best-selling and award-winning novel His Bloody Project. The book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2016 and went on to win acclaim and awards around the world.

A decade after it was first published, this book continues to dazzle. We’re celebrating with a 10th anniversary edition, bringing this mesmerising story to new readers and long-time fans alike.

 

If you love reading but haven’t yet found your way to this brilliant novel, here are ten reasons to add it to your tbr!

1. For fans of (un)True Crime…

If you enjoyed (for example) Eliza Clark’s novel Penance, you could be just as tightly grabbed by the (fictional) ‘true crime’ elements in His Bloody Project. Where Penance stitches together a series of fictional transcripts, letters and books to build its story, His Bloody Project is made up of doctor’s reports, witness accounts, trial transcripts and news reports – all of which were written by the author in the style of genuine documents of the time. Whether it’s podcasts, books or TV documentaries, true crime as a genre is ubiquitous today. As works of fiction, these ‘fake true crime’ books can delve deeper into the psychology – of both the criminals and the consumers – behind it.

2. For fans of True Crime!

If you loved Burial Rites by Hannah Kent, or perhaps Hallie Rubenhold’s Story of a Murder and The Five, or Emma Cline’s The Girls, then you appreciate reimagined stories based on a true crime, often exploring a viewpoint that has seen less attention. Or maybe your favourite book was The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, by Kate Summerscale, an excellent, straight-up non-fictional account of a true crime. If these are your bag, you’re very likely to love His Bloody Project, too, and the way it explores justice, sanity, the human psyche and more.

3. You want to compare it with the true story reimagined in Graeme’s new novella, Benbecula

Benbecula is the new fictionalised retelling of a true crime – a triple killing – that occurred on the Hebridean island of Benbecula in 1857. Graeme’s novella recounts these events from the viewpoint of the killer’s older brother, who is now himself an outcast in the remote crofting community where the action took place. There are many aspects of this story that overlap with the events in His Bloody Project, but this story IS a true crime that Graeme used as the basis for a fictional novella. (But is it fiction, non-fiction, true, made up…? Keep up! Graeme’s writing has confused the best of them, but in a good way, obviously!)

4. For those who appreciate the slippery distinctions between sanity and guilt…

His Bloody Project has echoes of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment in its themes of madness and alienation, and questions of culpability for heinous acts. There is no denying that the main protagonists in each case – Roderick Macrae and Raskolnikov – killed their victims. The question the books instead concern themselves with is: why? And were they of sound mind? A fascinating character study awaits you.

5. If you love to revisit the past through historical fiction …

Readers of historical fiction know that an excellent novel can be far more than just entertainment. It can portray history differently than the history books, and yet in many ways ring just as true. Part of the genius of double Booker-winner Hilary Mantel, for example, lies in the way she created a highly plausible inner life for that most complex of figures, Thomas Cromwell. Mantel’s research for Wolf Hall was extensive and rigorous. She conjured a believable, immersive world that helped us relive the drama.

Graeme’s job in creating a believable world for His Bloody Project was especially challenging because half the book is written in a first-person narrative. To be convincing to readers, the language needed to be absolutely authentic to its period. In this video interview, Graeme explains how he spent time collecting useful vocabulary and noting them in his ‘Emporium of Words’. Many readers have noted that the language calls to mind Robert Louis Stevenson and other Scottish writers of the period.

Both Hilary Mantel and Graeme saw their novels included in The Sunday Times best books of the decade 2010-2019. They are must-reads!

6. For readers who enjoy the drama of trial narratives…

If you loved Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites, in which a trial painted a different picture of an infamous event from the story portrayed in local popular accounts, you’ll love the twists and turns of His Bloody Project. It’s another novel that demonstrates how the scrutiny of a trial can show events in a new light. Hannah Kent’s story tells how two men were killed in a 19^th-century community in Iceland. It is based on a real incident in which rumour and prejudice were rife and may have affected the trial.

While His Bloody Project purports to be an account of a real event, it’s entirely fictional. Whether based on real events or not, though, and whether or not the witnesses are reliable, questions addressed or omitted during a trial cast a very different light on truth, bias and power than single-person accounts ever could. All of which makes for compelling drama and thought-provoking questions.

7. If you find prison memoirs fascinating

As a student, Graeme read I, Pierre Rivière, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister, and My Brother…, a prison memoir written by French peasant Pierre Rivière while in prison for killing his family, and edited for publication in the 1970s by Michel Foucault. Graeme was struck by the clash between the author’s eloquent writing style and the brutality of the acts he confessed to committing. So much so that he quotes it as the inspiration for writing His Bloody Project, many years after first reading the memoir. Would you think differently of a case if you heard directly from the perpetrator?

8. You’ve read Case Study or the Gorski trilogy. What’s next?

If you’ve read Graeme’s 2022 Booker Prize Longlisted Case Study, or the phenomenal Gorski trilogy, you won’t need any more persuading that it’s time to catch up on this exceptional author’s first Booker-listed novel, and his best-selling book to date.

9. For fans of a setting that becomes a character itself…

If you enjoyed the unsettling atmosphere and sense of place that formed the backdrop of novels including Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Andy Weir’s The Martian, or Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, His Bloody Project is for you. In His Bloody Project, the hamlet of Culduie is integral to the story and almost feels to the reader as though it is a character in its own right. The setting in these books is fundamental in establishing the sense of claustrophobia.

In His Bloody Project, Culduie (in this case a real setting) is tiny, consisting of just a few houses whose inhabitants were under the constant close scrutiny and control of the local laird’s vindictive constable, his right-hand man. You will find yourself hooked by the story of Roddy Macrae and his family in this unforgettable setting.

10. Just because: it’s so well loved already!

Hundreds of thousands of readers around the world love this book. What more reason do you need?!

 

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Born in Kilmarnock, Graeme Macrae Burnet is among the UK’s leading contemporary novelists, having achieved both critical acclaim and best-selling status around the world. He lives in Glasgow, where he studied film and English literature. After teaching English overseas and working as a researcher in the television industry, he won a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award in 2013 and now writes full-time. He is best known for his dazzling Booker-shortlisted second novel, His Bloody Project, and his fourth novel, Case Study, which was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Graeme is also the author of a trilogy of French-set detective novels: The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau (2014),  The Accident on the A35 (2017), and A Case of Matricide (2024).