Description
Booker-nominated Graeme Macrae Burnet returns to the historic Scotland of His Bloody Project to tell the multi-layered story of madness and murder in the MacPhee family.
During the summer of 1857 on the distant Scottish Island of Benbecula, Angus MacPhee, returning from a fortnight’s work at a house a few miles away, seems to have lost his mind, forcing his family to keep him shackled to his bed. When he is finally allowed to go at large, his erratic behaviour leads to the conviction that he should be committed to an asylum.
Five years later, Malcolm MacPhee is living alone in the house where his brother’s madness led to horrifying ends. Isolated, ostracised by his small community, Malcolm is haunted, the stench of his brother’s crimes lingering as the reek cleaves to the thatch. Is he afflicted by the same madness? And to where has his sister Marion disappeared?
Drawing on letters, asylum records, and witness statements, Graeme Macrae Burnet returns to the historic Scotland of His Bloody Project to construct a beguilingly layered narrative about madness, murder, and the uncertain nature of the self.
Praise for Graeme Macrae Burnet
“You can gulp down A Case of Matricide in one sitting, as the prose style seems to demand. But linger over Burnet’s novel, and its real pleasures emerge.”
—Sarah Weinman, New York Times
“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 . . . A diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades.”
—Christian Lorentzen, New York Times
“A mystery story—or is it?—that takes us into the heart of the psychoanalytical consulting room. Or does it? Interleaving a biography of radical ’60s ‘untherapist’ Collins Braithwaite with the notebooks of his patient ‘Rebecca,’ a young woman seeking answers about the death of her sister, ‘GMB’ presents a forensic, elusive and mordantly funny text(s) layered with questions about authenticity and the self.”
—2022 Booker Prize Judges
“A stylish, atmospheric mystery with a startling twist . . . [The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau] satisfies like Simenon and surprises like Ruth Rendell. I can’t give it any higher praise.”
—NPR
“A remarkable crime trilogy of doublings and disappearance . . . These are crime novels in which identities are unstable, evidence is slippery and solutions are obscure.”
—Nicholas Clee, Times Literary Supplement
“Burnet propels readers through [Case Study] with his fierce, hilarious intelligence.”
—Crime Reads
