Case Study
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 take her own life. 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.
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, and his fourth novel, Case Study, which was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. Graeme is also the author of a trilogy of French-set detective novels: The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau (2014), The Accident on the A35 (2017), and A Case of Matricide (2024).
Author portrait © Euan Anderson
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