Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet is one of Scotland’s brightest literary talents, winner in the Author of the Year category for the 2017 Sunday Herald Culture Awards (aka Scotland’s Oscars). His latest novel, Case Study is out now.
Born and brought up in Kilmarnock, he spent some years working as an English teacher in Prague, Bordeaux, Porto and London, before returning to Glasgow and working for eight years for various independent television companies. He has degrees in English Literature and International Security Studies from Glasgow and St Andrews universities respectively.
His first novel, The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (Contraband, 2014), received a New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust, was longlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award and was a cult hit. Set in small-town France, it is a compelling psychological portrayal of a peculiar outsider pushed to the limit by his own feverish imagination.
His second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), concerns a brutal triple murder in a remote Scottish Highland community during the 1860s. Lauded by critics and hugely popular with readers, His Bloody Project won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award and the Vrij Nederland Thriller of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Awards. It has been published around the world.
Graeme’s third novel, The Accident on the A35 (2017), is a literary mystery that takes place in Saint-Louis, the sleepy French backwater that was also the setting for The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau. It features the diffident Inspector Georges Gorski investigating a seemingly unremarkable fatal car crash – but where has the victim, an outwardly austere lawyer, been on the night of his death? Darkly humorous, subtle and sophisticated, The Accident on the A35 was longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2018 and the Hearst Big Book Awards – Harpers Bazaar Modern Classics 2018.
Case Study (2021) consists of a series of notebooks apparently sent to the author in 2020 to aid his research into a rogue 1960s psychotherapist. The notebooks reveal the story of a young woman convinced that this charismatic therapist was responsible for her sister’s suicide. Determined to get to the bottom of his role in her sister’s death, she assumes an alter ego and presents herself as a client to him.
Graeme has appeared at literary festivals in Australia, the USA, Germany, India, Russia, Spain, France, Korea, Denmark and Estonia. His novels have been translated into more than 20 languages and achieved bestseller status in several countries.
Author photo by Sveta Mishina
“A page-turning blast, funny, sinister and perfectly plotted … Rarely has being constantly wrong-footed been so much fun.” James Walton, The Times
“Very funny … engrossing.” Guardian
“Brilliant, bamboozling … burstingly alive and engaging.” Telegraph
“Compelling … I was hooked like a fish.” Spectator
‘I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger.’
London, 1965. An unworldly young woman believes that a charismatic psychotherapist, Collins Braithwaite, has driven her sister to suicide. Intent on confirming her suspicions, she assumes a false identity and presents herself to him as a client, recording her experiences in a series of notebooks. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything. Even her own character.
In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents these notebooks interspersed with his own biographical research into Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling – and often wickedly humorous – meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.
From the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted His Bloody Project. www.casestudyGMB.com
Prizes and awards
LONGLISTED: GORDON BURN PRIZE 2022
REVIEWS OF Case Study
“Burnet’s triumph is that it’s a page-turning blast, funny, sinister and perfectly plotted so as to reveal — or withhold — its secrets in a consistently satisfying way … Rarely has being constantly wrong-footed been so much fun.” James Walton, The Times
"Enormous fun … a mystery and a psychological drama wrapped up in one. Case Study is a triumph." Alex Preston, Observer
"Caustically funny and surprisingly moving, this is one of the finest novels of the year." Christian House, Financial Times
"A riveting psychological plot ... tortuous, cunning ... clever." Kate Webb, The Times Literary Supplement
'Encourages us to look more closely at the inherent instability of fiction itself … genuinely affecting … a very funny book.' Nina Allan, Guardian