Graeme Macrae Burnet’s highly acclaimed and Booker longlisted novel, CASE STUDY, has made the Historical Writers’ Association 2022 Gold Crown Award longlist.
These annual awards celebrate the best historical writing, fiction and non-fiction, published in the UK and ‘its ability to engage, illuminate, entertain and inform legions of readers.’ Other titles on this year’s Gold Crown Award longlist include: BOOTH by Karen Joy Fowler, THE WOLF DEN by Elodie Harper, ALL OF YOU EVERY SINGLE ONE by Beatrice Hitchman, SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE by Clare Keegan, THE WINTER WAR by Tim Leach, THE THIN PLACE by CD Major, THE REBEL DAUGHTER by Miranda Malins, THE FORTUNE MEN by Nadifa Mohamed, THE KINGDOMS by Natasha Pulley, THE GREAT PASSION by James Runcie and GREAT CIRCLE by Maggie Shipstead.
The shortlist will be announced on the 25th of October 2022, and the winner revealed in an awards ceremony on the 23rd of November.
CASE STUDY was published to great acclaim by Saraband Books in UK and Text in Australia, with the audio edition released by Bolinda. It has already been the recipient of numerous accolades, including being longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Award, as well as being chosen as a Book of the year in 2021 by The Spectator, The Scotsman and Waterstones. It is shortlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2022 and was one of Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s favourite books of 2021. To date, translation rights have been sold in 16 further countries, and it will be published in North America later this year by Biblioasis, with Graeme going on tour for festivals and book signings in Canada and the US, including Vancouver, Ottawa, Chicago and New York.
Through a series of notebooks, CASE STUDY follows the story of a young woman who, convinced that the psychotherapist Arthur Collins Braithwaite is responsible for her sister's suicide, assumes a fake identity and presents herself to him as a patient so she can find out the truth about her sister. What ensues is a thrilling game of cat and mouse between therapist and patient, as well as writer and reader.
Written using Burnet’s distinctive flair for character and plot, this dazzling, dizzying novel is an extraordinary mediation on sanity, identity and truth itself.
About Graeme Macrae Burnet
Graeme Macrae Burnet was brought up Kilmarnock, Ayrshire and now lives in Glasgow. He has also lived in the Czech Republic, France, Portugal and London. He has appeared at festivals and events in Australia, New Zealand, the US, Russia, Estonia, Macau, Ireland, Germany and France, as well as in the UK. He has also been shortlisted for many European and American literary awards.
His first novel, THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ADÈLE BEDEAU (Contraband, 2014), received a New Writer’s Award from the Scottish Book Trust and was longlisted for the Waverton Good Read Award. A second Inspector Gorski novel, THE ACCIDENT ON THE A35, was published in 2017, the year he won Author of the Year for the Sunday Herald Culture Awards.
HIS BLOODY PROJECT (Contraband, 2015) won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the LA Times Book Awards. It has been published to great acclaim around the world and film rights have been optioned by Synchronicity.
Praise for CASE STUDY
‘A novel of mind-bending brilliance. Graeme Macrae Burnet is a master of muddying the waters, of troubling ideas of truth and identity, fiction and documentary, and CASE STUDY shows him at the height of his powers.’ – Hannah Kent
‘Burnet’s triumph is that it’s a page-turning blast, funny, sinister and perfectly plotted so as to reveal – or withhold – its secrets in a consistently satisfying way. It also does a fine job of keeping our sympathies shifting, and of conjuring up a lost cultural era. Rarely has being constantly wrong-footed been so much fun.’ – James Walton, The Times
‘A thrilling investigation into sanity and identity.’ – Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller
‘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, and ought to give Saraband another success story.’ – Alex Preston, Guardian, ‘Book of the Day’
‘Graeme Macrae Burnet’s CASE STUDY is a novel about a 1960s psychologist where the blurring between fact and fiction constantly wrong-foots its readers while still keeping us lavishly entertained.’ – James Walton, The Spectator, ‘Books of the Year’
‘Fun and funny, sly and serious, a beguiling literary game that manages to say more about the nature of the self than any number of more self-consciously solemn works.’ – David Szalay
‘What’s real and what’s not is beside the point in this skilful portrait of a disturbed woman and her encounters with an experimental 1960s psychotherapist… Both strands quickly become compelling… I was hooked like a fish.’ – Leyla Sanai, The Spectator
‘This is a novel which, like Macrae Burnet’s previous ones, holds the attention, develops an insidious narrative interest, and poses questions about the nature of the self and the authenticity of identity… As in his other novels, Macrae Burnet writes with an admirable lucidity, at the same time being able to probe and shed light on the dark places of the mind. Writing in a prose that is spare, deadpan and yet alive, he poses questions about the nature and perception of what we choose to call reality. He is an uncommonly interesting and satisfying novelist.’ – Allan Massie, The Scotsman
Visit Graeme’s website