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. Graeme is also the author of two French-set detective novels: The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau (2014) and The Accident on the A35 (2017). Case Study is his fourth novel and was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.
His Bloody Project: Limited Edition Hardback
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Buy His Bloody Project: Limited Edition Hardback
From the twice Booker-listed author of Case Study, a unique opportunity to buy a new, hardback edition of the Booker-shortlisted His Bloody Project.
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
SHORTLISTED: Man Booker Prize 2016
REVIEWS OF His Bloody Project: Limited Edition Hardback
“His Bloody Project plunges the reader into a remote Scottish world where Victorian anthology distorts the profoundly human plight of its complex protagonist.” – Man Booker Prize judges
“Graeme Macrae Burnet makes such masterly use of the narrative form that the horrifying tale he tells… seems plucked straight out of Scotland’s sanguinary historical archives.” – Marilyn Stasio, New York Times
“[A] powerful, absorbing novel… 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 Scotland… [A] cleverly constructed tale… Has the lineaments of the crime thriller but some of the sociology of a Thomas Hardy novel.” – Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal
“Such an engrossing plot that I couldn’t put it down once I started reading it. Definitely one of the best books this year.” – Nicola Sturgeon, Books of the Year, The Herald
“Graeme 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.” – Val McDermid, Best Books of 2016, The Guardian
“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
“Disembowels rosy illusions about Highland life in Victorian Scotland. Dark, but impossible to put aside until finished.” – Neil Ascherson, Books of the Year, The Herald
“Beautifully written … 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
