Synopses & Reviews
Longlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize
The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination.
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.
Review
"Such is Burnet's skill that he immediately convinces the reader that everything he is about to say is based on historical fact ... brilliantly depicted ... intriguing ... compulsive reading." Irish Times
Review
"Encourages us to look more closely at the inherent instability of fiction itself ... genuinely affecting ... a very funny book." Nina Allan, The Guardian
About the Author
Graeme Macrae Burnet is among Scotland's leading contemporary novelists. Best known for his dazzling Booker-shortlisted second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), he is also the author of two Simenon-influenced novels: The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau (2014) and The Accident on the A35 (2017). Burnet 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 twenty languages and achieved bestseller status in several countries. He lives and works in Glasgow.