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 ‘intense and utterly compelling.’
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 ‘astonishing’, ‘fiendishly readable’ and ‘spellbinding’. 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 ‘a novel of mind-bending brilliance.’ The Financial Times declared A Case of Matricide ‘a triumph’. It won the Australian Crime Writers Best International Crime award.
Graeme’s work has been translated into more than twenty languages, and he has appeared at festivals all over the world.
The Accident on the A35
Read an extract
There does not appear to be anything remarkable about the fatal car crash on the A35. But one question dogs Inspector Georges Gorski: where has the victim, an outwardly austere lawyer, been on the night of his death?
The troubled Gorski finds himself drawn into a mystery that takes him behind the respectable veneer of the sleepy French backwater of Saint-Louis.
Graeme Macrae Burnet returns with a literary mystery that will beguile fans of His Bloody Project and The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau. Darkly humorous, subtle and sophisticated, The Accident on the A35 burrows deep into the psyches of its characters and explores the forgotten corners of small-town life.
Prizes and awards
Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2018, LONGLISTED
Hearst Big Book Awards – Harpers Bazaar Modern Classics 2018, LONGLISTED
REVIEWS OF The Accident on the A35
"Gripping and intelligent." Philip Pullman
"Highly accomplished, The Accident on the A35 works on several levels… The narration has the simple momentum of classic crime writing… It has a denouement like something out of Greek tragedy but delivers as a proper police procedural too… Burnet’s cleverness doesn’t get in the way of your enjoyment but playfully adds levels of meaning." Anthony Cummins, Observer
"[A] truly superlative tale… fascinating… one of the most clever and compelling novels to be published this year." Lesley McDowell, Herald
"★★★★ As steeped in the works of Simenon as a good boeuf bourgignon is in red wine. The characters’ pretensions are mercilessly exposed in frill-free prose… What matters, of course, is whether a novel’s characters seem to the reader to be alive. Burnet’s do." Jake Kerridge, Telegraph
"There are so many echoes of French writers in this book… [Raymond] is a fantastic depiction of the typical alienated teenager." Alex Clark, BBC Radio 4 Open Book
"Clever, meandering and oh, so French… Burnet really has — a rare thing nowadays — a novelist’s eye… I confess myself seduced by the atmosphere of provincial ennui. I longed to shrug gallically at a detective through a haze of cigarette smoke, to pour myself a drink from a cut-glass decanter, to drive to the next town to make acrobatic love to a beautiful…I’m getting carried away." James Marriott, Times
"Graeme Macrae Burnet's best book yet. A unique and compelling novel…[It] works perfectly as a page-turning crime fiction, but it’s also moody and Gallic and wittily deadly serious." Chris Dolan
"Elegant, craftily written and frequently funny." Phil Miller, Herald
"Simenon fans will feel at home in the claustrophobic and petty-minded atmosphere of the French provinces." The Times and Sunday Times Crime Club ‘Picks of the Month’
"Fans of His Bloody Project will [enjoy] familiar themes including questions of authorship, betrayal, family, love, death, truth and lies (or rather, what can be said to be true, if anything, and what is false?), and the possibilities of youth versus the reality of adulthood." Alistair Braidwood, Scots Whay Hae
