Graeme Macrae Burnet
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).
His Bloody Project
Documents relating to the case of Roderick Macrae: 10th Anniversary Edition
BUYING OPTIONS
Buy His Bloody Project
Graeme Macrae Burnet’s propulsive, Booker-shortlisted contemporary classic – reissued to mark its tenth anniversary.
The year is 1869. A brutal triple murder in a remote community in the Scottish Highlands leads to the arrest of a young man by the name of Roderick Macrae. A memoir written by the accused makes it clear that he is guilty, but it falls to the country’s finest legal and psychiatric minds to uncover what drove him to commit such merciless acts of violence.
Was he mad? Only the persuasive powers of his advocate stand between Macrae and the gallows. Graeme Macrae Burnet tells an irresistible and original story about the provisional nature of truth, even when the facts seem clear.
His Bloody Project is a mesmerising literary thriller set in an unforgiving landscape where the exercise of power is arbitrary.
Prizes and awards
Booker Prize 2016: Shortlisted
Scotland's National Book Awards 2016: Fiction Book of the Year: Winner
Los Angeles Times Book Awards 2016: Finalist
REVIEWS OF His Bloody Project
‘A smart amalgam of legal thriller and literary game that reads as if Umberto Eco has been resurrected in the 19th-century Scottish Highlands’. Mark Lawson, The Guardian
‘A brilliantly written story of rural hardship, fractured community and eventual, inescapable bloodshed.’ Ian Rankin, The Guardian
‘Rich, atmospheric … unsettling and impossible to put down.’ The Times, best historical novels of the decade
