Case Study

Graeme Macrae Burnet offers a dazzlingly inventive - & often wickedly humorous - meditation on the nature of sanity, identity & truth itself,  by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.

‘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 & 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 is a game of cat-and-mouse between therapist and patient, between truth & deception, & between author & reader. It is a novel seething with secrets & teasing questions about the nature of identity itself, an enthralling, playful & layered depiction of 1960s society & the radical psychiatry propounded by R. D. Laing.

"The defining essence of Burnet’s work to date is to be found in this kind of literary gamesmanship, a brand of metatextuality that is as much about exploiting the possibilities of the novel form as it is about blurring the boundaries between appearance & reality… Burnet has always delighted in undermining such easy assumptions, & in Case Study he ups the stakes still further, providing a veritable layer cake of possible realities to get lost in…Entertaining & mindfully engrossing in equal measure." — The Guardian

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Best known for his dazzling Booker-shortlisted second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), Burnet is also the author of a trilogy set in France & written in a style influenced by the Belgian novelist Georges Simenon: The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau, (2014),  The Accident on the A35 (2017), & A Case of Matricide (2024).