case study graeme macrae burnet

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Case Study Audio CD – MP3 Audio, February 15, 2023

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Shortlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize • Shortlisted for the 2022 Ned Kelly Awards • Longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize • Longlisted for the 2022 HWA Gold Crown Award

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. 'I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger,' writes an anonymous patient, a young woman investigating her sister's suicide. In the guise of a dynamic and troubled alter-ego named Rebecca Smyth, she makes an appointment with the notorious and roughly charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite, whom she believes is responsible for her sister's death. But in this world of beguilement and bamboozlement, neither she nor we can be certain of anything.

Case Study is a novel as slippery as it is riveting, as playful as it is sinister, a meditation on truth, sanity, and the instability of identity by one of the most inventive novelists of our time.

Language English
Publisher Bolinda Audio
Publication date February 15, 2023
Dimensions 5.25 x 0.5 x 6.75 inches
ISBN-10 1038635144
ISBN-13 978-1038635143
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His Bloody Project: Documents Relating to the Case of Roderick Macrae (Man Booker Prize Finalist 2016)

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About the author, product details.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bolinda Audio; Unabridged edition (February 15, 2023)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1038635144
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1038635143
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.68 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.5 x 6.75 inches
#49,392 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
#134,425 in Books on CD
#364,165 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Graeme macrae burnet.

Graeme Macrae Burnet is the author of the 'fiendishly readable' His Bloody Project, which was shortlisted for the 2016 Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Awards. It won the Saltire Prize for Fiction and has been published to great acclaim in twenty languages around the world.

His 2021 novel Case Study was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Ned Kelly International Crime Prize and Gordon Burn Prize. Hannah Kent (Burial Rites) called it 'a novel of mind-bending brilliance.'

He is also the author of a trilogy of novels set in the small French town of Saint-Louis and featuring detective Georges Gorski: The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau (2014) and The Accident on the A35 (2017) and A Case of Matricide (October 2024).

"If Roland Barthes had written a detective novel, this would be it," was the Literary Review's verdict on The Accident on the A35

Born and brought up in Kilmarnock in the west of Scotland, Graeme now lives in Glasgow.

You can find him on twitter at @GMacraeBurnet.

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Case Study in Excellent Contemporary Literature

4.0 out of 5 stars Clever but fizzles out

3.0 out of 5 stars lives in puzzle.

5.0 out of 5 stars Depicts Intertwined Nature of Reality

4.0 out of 5 stars i was left feeling i’d missed the point of this book.

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly enjoyed the writing style, character depiction, dialogue, humor, and ending)

2.0 out of 5 stars not what i expected, 4.0 out of 5 stars rd laing on steroids, top reviews from other countries, 2.0 out of 5 stars what a strangely unsatisfying read, and.

5.0 out of 5 stars Psychiatry and the counter-culture…

3.0 out of 5 stars a bit too clever, 4.0 out of 5 stars mind-bending stuff, 3.0 out of 5 stars classist.

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Graeme Macrae Burnet

“A novel of mind-bending brilliance.” Hannah Kent

“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.

Case Study was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize , shortlisted for the Ned Kelly International Crime Prize and for the Gordon Burn Prize and named by the New York Times as one of 100 Notable Books of the Year .

“ The defining essence of Burnet’s work … is as much about exploiting the possibilities of the novel form as it is about blurring the boundaries between appearance and reality.” Nina Allen, The Guardian

“Burnet captures his characters’ voice so brilliantly that what might have been just an intellectual game feels burstingly alive and engaging.” Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph

“A page turning blast, funny, sinister and perfectly plotted.” James Walton, The Times

You can order a copy from your local bookshop or from bookshop.org or find out more here .

Yipee ki-yay, motherbooker

Swearing, rants, reviews, on every level, book review – case study by graeme macrae burnet.

I had to Google the Booker Prize shortlist that saw Graeme Macrae Burnet’s novel His Bloody Project competing for the prize. It was way back in 2016, which is crazy. It feels as though I only read that a couple of years ago. I definitely wanted Burnet to win but that’s mostly because it was the only one that I’d read. That doesn’t mean it didn’t deserve it. His Bloody Project was an absolute masterpiece in the way that it blended fact and fiction. I knew that this was a writer that I wanted to read in the future. So, I ordered a copy of his next book as soon as it was possible. I knew that it was going to be something big. But could it possibly be as good as his last book?

It takes a very accomplished author to successfully blend fact and fiction without it seeming gimmicky. In His Bloody Project , Graeme Macrae Burnet proved that he was the kind of author who could make it work. His latest novel takes that idea even further. Not only is the fictional tale being presented as fact but he weaves in real-world figures to back it up. Each historical reference has been carefully chosen to add credence to the non-fiction style the book adopts. This makes the reading experience a complex and engaging one. It is up to the reader to decide what is and isn’t real. It is for them to decide what is true and what isn’t. I can imagine that plenty of readers will turn to Google as soon as they’ve finished reading to find out if certain people exist or not. This is all down to the strength of his writing.

The narrative is presented as a non-fiction book delving into the history of a long-forgotten (and fictional) psychotherapist Arthur Collins Braithwaite. Braithwaite was a contemporary of people like R D Laing and was a very controversial figure. His theories were all over the place and his ego prevented him from taking advice from anyone. Burnet’s novel is split between a fictional biography of Braithwaite and a series of notebooks that he was sent. The journals were sent to him by a Mr Martin Grey and were written by his cousin, a former patient of Braithwaite. She first met with the therapist after her sister’s suicide because she believe that Braithwaite may have played a role in it. She decides to go undercover and invents an alter ego for herself. But what does she discover about the figure and what kind of picture does it pain when combined with Braithwaite’s own past?

The notebooks from the unnamed young woman are presented in full and, before we even get to the main body of the novel, the preface begins with an admission of inaccuracies. Certain places have been misnamed in the journals and the geography doesn’t make complete sense. That means we are already being conditioned to question everything that we read. Can we trust her as a narrator and believe what she is saying? The fact that her behaviour becomes more and more erratic over time only makes it harder to trust what we’re reading. At the same time, the biography that runs alongside it presents the image of a troubled mind. Is Braithwaite really the type of person who should be holding council over anyone’s mental health? In his youth, Burnet had an interest in reading psychiatric case studies and you can see that he is having a lot of fun turning that format on its head. Instead of getting the therapist’s insight into the patient, the tables are turned.

From the outset, our unnamed female narrator is presented as a prim and proper girl from a wealthy family. She seems to exhibit perfectly normal behaviour for a twenty-something girl of that time. However, as we continue reading her words, it becomes clear that there is something beneath the surface. Is she simply playing a role or is there something deeper going on? It initially seems as though the power balance has merely shifted from doctor to patient but we are quickly left wondering who is actually in control here. It’s a fascinating and engaging reading experience, which is exactly what Burnet wanted. He has always said that he enjoys presenting his fiction with a strong sense of reality and this is a great example of that working successfully. You not only want to believe this happened but find it difficult to remember it didn’t.

This is metafiction on a whole new level and offers a new kind of engagement. One in which a reader can become fully immersed in a fictional world. Yes, we’ve all been immersed in what we’ve read before but there’s always that barrier. We always know that the novel we’re reading isn’t real. Burnet adds so much detail and realism to his work that these characters could easily be real. You could be reading history. The lines between fact and fiction are blurred so extremely and so expertly. There are so many fictional layers in this novel that you start to question everything. Not only do we have the fictional journal writer and her fictional therapist but there’s the fictional version of Burnet writing the biography. I mean, can we even be sure that the real Graeme Macrae Burnet is real anymore?

What we can trust is that Case Study is another masterpiece. Unlike His Bloody Project , there is humour here that brings a slightly lighter tone to the proceedings. It feels more fun and free than his previous work. The novel is an interesting look back to the 1960s counterculture thanks to the people Braithwaite interacts with. Any reader willing to get on board with the concept will enjoy a rich reading experience. It won’t appeal to anyone looking for everything to be neatly wrapped up at the end or who needs an answer to everything. However, it could force you to question everything you think you know about the novel form and your overall sense of self. It’s an absolutely astounding novel and is unlike anything I’ve read before.

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Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet

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B+ : very fine writing; enjoyably spun tale

See our review for fuller assessment.

From the Reviews : "Graeme Macrae Burnet’s barnstorming psychodrama, which successfully fuses mystery, comedy and a meditation on the nebulous nature of identity. (...) The musty north London milieu, with its chintzy tea rooms, cold park benches and sticky pubs, is brilliantly evoked. (...) Burnet’s greatest achievement, however, is making you care about a woman whose name you do not know, a doctor you don’t want to know and a story you can’t trust. Consistently inventive, caustically funny and surprisingly moving, this is one of the finest novels of the year." - Christian House, Financial Times "The painstakingly assembled, predominantly mimetic fiction of the 19th century has trained us to trust the author; Burnet has always delighted in undermining such easy assumptions, and in Case Study he ups the stakes still further, providing a veritable layer cake of possible realities to get lost in. (...) If Burnet’s aim in writing Case Study was to force us up against the contradictions of our conflicted selves, he has surely succeeded. This is a novel that is entertaining and mindfully engrossing in equal measure." - Nina Allan, The Guardian " Case Study has a lot in common with the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Roberto Bolaño, in which invented characters pass through tumultuous episodes of literary history that never quite happened, though it seems as if they should have. (...) Case Study is a diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades. As such, it is not exactly an excursion into undiscovered literary terrain. Reading Burnet’s doubly mediated metafiction of North London neurotics and decadents, I often longed to turn back to the shelf for the real thing: fictions by Doris Lessing, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Muriel Spark, Jenny Diski, Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, Zadie Smith or Rachel Cusk; biographies of Plath and Hughes; films of kitchen-sink realism starring Bogarde and Laurence Harvey, with scripts by Harold Pinter; or even the documentaries of Adam Curtis, in which Laing often makes a cameo." - Christian Lorentzen, The New York Times Book Review "It’s a book that is enormous fun to read, a mystery and a psychological drama wrapped up in one. Buoyed by the evident pleasure Macrae Burnet takes in spinning such a tightly knit tale -- the author’s note at the end is magnificent -- Case Study is a triumph" - Alex Preston, The Observer "The notebooks are interspersed with a biography of Braithwaite by Burnet, who tells us he has studied his books. Both strands quickly become compelling. (...) I was hooked like a fish." - Leyla Sanai, The Spectator "(T)ortuous, cunning and highly self-conscious (.....) Readers who equate self-referentiality with intellectual integrity, or who simply enjoy being toyed with, are in for a treat. (...) What is so clever about Burnet’s novel, and the source of much of its humour, is the introduction into this permissive environment of Rebecca, the mousey homebody who ends up outwitting the so-called genius. (...) Ultimately, what the author wants to show us is that, by pulling us into his tale, he can leave ink on our hands too." - Kate Webb, Times Literary Supplement Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

Writing something down invests it with a kind of significance, but in general things are of such little consequence, even to those involved, that the act of recording them is no more than vanity.

My diary, however, was a work of fiction. I constructed a character, much as any novelist would do, and all for the benefit of a single reader. It is not that what I wrote was untrue. At least as far as I can recall, these things did actually happen. It's just that, taken together, they create a false impression. The real truth lay not in what I wrote, but in what I omitted.

The thing is, petal, it doesn't actually matter to me whether any of it actually happened. What matters is that this was the story you chose to tell.

Braithwaite takes as his starting point the idea that if one is going to talk about the self, one should begin by defining what one means. He quickly descends, however, into claiming that defining the self at all is a fraudulent act: the Self does not exist as an entity or a thing; if it exists at all, it is no more than a projection of the self (the book is full ofsuch paradoxes).

Everything you do is concealment. And it's not that you're concealing something from me. You're concealing it from yourself. You're buried under a landslide of fakery. The way you dress is fake. The way you speak is fake. Even the way you hold your cigarette is fake. You're a phoney.

Ever since I took up the habit, I have loved smoking more than anything. Smoking is a veil.

She leapt off and he had been left holding nothing but her shoe. That shoe, along with her other clothing and the contents of her handbag, were later returned to us. The second shoe was never recovered, but as her feet were two sizes larger than mine, I could not in any case have worn them.