Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet was born in Kilmarnock and now lives in Glasgow. He is the author of five novels and a novella. His novels are His Bloody Project, Case Study and the French-set Gorski trilogy, the final part of which A Case of Matricide was published in October 2024. His novella Benbecula was published in October 2025 in Polygon’s Darklands series. The Guardian called it βintense and utterly compelling.β
His Bloody Project was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize, the LA Times Mystery Book of the Year and the European Crime Fiction prize and won the Saltire Prize for Fiction. It was variously described as βastonishingβ, βfiendishly readableβ and βspellbindingβ. Case Study was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022. Hannah Kent called it βa novel of mind-bending brilliance.β The Financial Times declared A Case of Matricide ‘a triumph’. It won the Australian Crime Writers Best International Crime award.
Graemeβs work has been translated into more than twenty languages, and he has appeared at festivals all over the world.
His Bloody Project: Limited Edition Hardback
From the twice Booker-listed author ofΒ Case Study, a unique opportunity to buy a new, hardback edition of the Booker-shortlisted His Bloody Project.Β
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 countryβs 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
SHORTLISTED: Man Booker Prize 2016
REVIEWS OF His Bloody Project: Limited Edition Hardback
βHis Bloody Project plunges the reader into a remote Scottish world where Victorian anthology distorts the profoundly human plight of its complex protagonist.β β Man Booker Prize judges
βGraeme Macrae Burnet makes such masterly use of the narrative form that the horrifying tale he tellsβ¦ seems plucked straight out of Scotlandβs sanguinary historical archives.β β Marilyn Stasio, New York Times
β[A] powerful, absorbing novelβ¦ Fiction authors from Henry James to Vladimir Nabokov to Gillian Flynn have used [an unreliable narrator] to induce ambiguity, heighten suspense and fold an alternative story between the lines of a printed text. Mr. Burnet, a Glasgow author, does all of that and more in this page-turning period account of pathos and violence in 19th-century Scotlandβ¦ [A] cleverly constructed taleβ¦ Has the lineaments of the crime thriller but some of the sociology of a Thomas Hardy novel.β β Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal
βSuch an engrossing plot that I couldnβt put it down once I started reading it. Definitely one of the best books this year.β β Nicola Sturgeon, Books of the Year, The Herald
βGraeme Macrae Burnet sucked me in from the very first page with compelling narratives about a triple murder. A series of convincing but unreliable voices circles the central event and left me breathless.β β Val McDermid, Best Books of 2016, The Guardian
βA smart amalgam of legal thriller and literary game that reads as if Umberto Eco has been resurrected in the 19th-century Scottish Highlands.β β Mark Lawson, The Guardian
βDisembowels rosy illusions about Highland life in Victorian Scotland. Dark, but impossible to put aside until finished.β β Neil Ascherson, Books of the Year, The Herald
βBeautifully written β¦ What I really love about the book is how it upends the usual romantic notion of what was like to live in rural Scotland and instead it gives you a portrait of what it can be like to be swallowed up by small places. Douglas Stuart
