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Did an Unorthodox Therapist Drive a Woman to Suicide?

“Case Study,” by Graeme Macrae Burnet, is a novel of found documents detailing troubled lives and shifting identities.

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By Christian Lorentzen

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CASE STUDY, by Graeme Macrae Burnet

To get to Primrose Hill from central London, you take the Tube to Chalk Farm Station, exit to your right toward a cafe and an off-license, and climb a path to an overpass above train tracks. The path is called, rather unassumingly, Bridge Approach, and a five-minute walk leads to Primrose Hill. I happened to live in these parts for three years, and I crossed the overpass twice a day most days. Just to the south is the Pembroke Castle pub, where Liam Gallagher of Oasis was once arrested, in 1998. Another neighborhood tippler, Kingsley Amis, favored the Queen’s at the corner of St. George’s Terrace, according to his biographer Zachary Leader, who printed his monthly tab. From my balcony I could see the phone box where Sylvia Plath would desperately call Ted Hughes at his lover’s flat in her last days. It is a quiet neighborhood, but one dense with intrigue and peopled by famous, messy and tortured artistic personages.

The events of Graeme Macrae Burnet’s fourth novel, “Case Study,” are set off by a suicide in the 1960s by a young woman named Veronica, who jumps from the Bridge Approach overpass and is struck by the 4:45 train to High Barnet. (I am not sure that High Barnet trains, rather than Edgware-bound ones, run on this track, nor that the overpass itself, rather than just the path that approaches it, is called Bridge Approach, but these are the sorts of possible slight inaccuracies that Burnet and his not entirely reliable narrators relish.) An investigation into Veronica’s death and the man who might have been responsible for it — her therapist, Arthur Collins Braithwaite, whose office is on Primrose Hill — forms the substance of the narrative. Like Burnet’s previous novel, “ His Bloody Project ” (2016), “Case Study” was nominated for the Booker Prize and consists largely of purportedly found documents.

The would-be Miss Marple of Burnet’s loopy detective story is Veronica’s unnamed younger sister, who, under the alias Rebecca Smyth, becomes Braithwaite’s patient to find out if he drove Veronica to take her own life. Rebecca details her five sessions in notebooks that decades later end up in the hands of a writer named GMB, our frame narrator, who is researching Braithwaite for a potential biography. Now cast into obscurity, the (fictional) therapist was once a figure of note, appearing on BBC chat shows and publishing the books “Untherapy,” a best seller, and “Kill Your Self,” which Rebecca calls “a jumble of incomprehensible sentences, each having no discernible relationship to its neighbors.” Still, we are told by GMB, “Kill Your Self” “captured the zeitgeist,” acquired for its author a cult following from which he drew a lucrative pool of patients, and “if anything, the impenetrability of certain passages only served to confirm the author’s genius.”

“Case Study” consists of a preface, in which GMB explains how he received the notebooks (from Rebecca’s cousin, who noticed a blog post by GMB on Braithwaite); the five notebooks themselves, one of which includes a chapter clipped from “Untherapy” about a patient who is clearly Veronica; five biographical chapters about Braithwaite by GMB, inserted between the notebooks; and a postscript, in which GMB ventures south to pay a visit to the Pembroke Castle. The elegant nested structure is one of the novel’s chief appeals. So is the contrast between Rebecca’s narrative voice, characterized by what GMB calls “a certain kooky élan,” and the cool tone of GMB’s Life of Braithwaite. What emerges is a comedy of identities tried on and discarded. Given the number of suicides that mark the story, it’s a comedy with dark underpinnings.

Rebecca lives with her father, a retired engineer, and their housekeeper, and works as a receptionist for a talent agent. Her mother died when she was 15, falling off a cliff before her eyes, during a family holiday in Devon. Given that Rebecca is the only witness to the fall, and that she admits to fantasizing about pushing someone off the cliff the sentence before recounting her mother’s death, we can’t help suspecting that she might have done it herself. But we have no more reason to doubt it than the rest of her story, and that’s part of the fun: The whole tale might be a hoax.

Unlike Veronica, who was a doctoral student in mathematics at Cambridge, Rebecca is not very ambitious. She’s an erstwhile fiction writer, having given up on writing after the one story she published in Women’s Journal didn’t have editors banging down the door for more. She is a homebody, happy to tend to her father and not be a “Modern Independent Woman.” She attests to being a virgin, and so becoming Rebecca Smyth means becoming someone else: the sort of woman who puts on lipstick, attends glamorous parties and drinks gin with gentlemen at the Pembridge Castle (as she calls the Pembroke Castle). Since she is not really that sort of woman, drinking even a little gin causes her to vomit in the bathroom the first time she tries it.

Braithwaite is also someone who puts on new identities, but at the same time he’s a recognizable English type: the humble boy from northern England who goes down to Oxford after the war and reinvents himself as a kind of romantic rogue. “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. Braithwaite brushes against real-life figures, engaging in hostile correspondence with the psychiatrist R.D. Laing and becoming a confidant of the actor Dirk Bogarde. After an overblown scandal consumes his therapeutic practice and sets him off on a bender, he winds up back at the home of his father (another suicide) in the North, where he writes his unpublished memoir, “My Self and Other Strangers.” It is the source, we are told, of GMB’s biographical reconstructions.

“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. It’s a compliment to put “Case Study” in that company and no insult to say that Burnet must have done his homework to get there. I imagine he lives in a flat full of piles of yellowing copies of The Times Literary Supplement, every issue a catalog of obscurities from across time. Humble children from the provinces who want to reinvent themselves have to get the stuff of their daydreams from somewhere.

Christian Lorentzen’s work has appeared in The London Review of Books, Bookforum and Harper’s Magazine.

CASE STUDY | By Graeme Macrae Burnet | 278 pp. | Biblioasis | Paperback, $17.95

An earlier version of this review misstated R.D. Laing’s profession. He was a psychiatrist, not a psychologist.

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Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet review – mind games as an artform

The fictional biography of a radical 60s psychoanalyst is expertly intercut with his pseudo-patient’s notebooks in this tightly constructed, hugely enjoyable mystery

L ike the star footballer who continues to play for his home town when bigger names come calling, there’s something pleasing about the author who, despite great success, sticks with their original publisher. Graeme Macrae Burnet’s second novel, His Bloody Project , was a runaway hit, shortlisted for the Booker prize and translated into 20 languages. His publisher, Saraband, is a small but brilliant independent press and has done a fine job with the elegant hardback of his fourth novel, Case Study .

It is ostensibly the biography – written by Macrae Burnet – of a (fictional) radical psychoanalyst in the mould of RD Laing, Collins Braithwaite. Braithwaite, who called himself an “untherapist”, was known as “Britain’s most dangerous man” in the 1960s, but his ideas faded until he was “barely a footnote in psychiatric history”. At the beginning of Case Study , Macrae Burnet tells us that he has come into possession of a series of notebooks written in the 60s by a patient of Braithwaite – a young woman, Veronica – who believes that the psychoanalyst has driven her sister to suicide.

Roberto Bolaño said that all novels are at their core detective novels. Macrae Burnet expands upon this, suggesting that the reader and the psychoanalyst – such intimate bedfellows – are both detectives gathering clues in pursuit of a final judgment that lies always just out of sight.

In her journal, Veronica tells us that she has gone to Braithwaite under a pseudonym, Rebecca Smyth, in the hope of understanding what happened to her sister, who threw herself from an overpass. “Suicide makes Miss Marples of us all,” she says. She endows Smyth with a character that is rakish, confident, provocative – quite the opposite to her own mousily downtrodden nature. Braithwaite analyses her – this fictitious self – as she attempts to winkle out revelations from him. These texts are intercut with selections from Braithwaite’s notebooks, from Macrae Burnet’s convincingly earnest biographical study of Braithwaite.

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.

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Review: 'case study,' by graeme macrae burnet.

The underdog on the 2016 Man Booker Prize shortlist was the then relatively unknown Scottish author Graeme Macrae Burnet. Although it lost out to Paul Beatty in the end, Burnet's historical crime novel about one man's "most sanguinary deeds" made him a writer to watch. For "His Bloody Project" was more than a stirring tale of murder and madness in the Scottish Highlands in the 19th century. Composed of memoir excerpts, police statements and medical reports, it was also a cleverly crafted work, one that invited the reader to sift the collated evidence and determine the reliability of the narrators.

Burnet's new novel is another formally inventive offering made up of various documents, all of which act as interwoven narrative threads. "Case Study" sees Burnet re-examining themes of reality and identity through characters and sources that may or may not tell the whole story. Once again, he opens with a preface by a writer called "GMB," who attempts to pass off the startling fiction that follows as fact.

GMB explains how he came to possess six notebooks written by a former patient of Collins Braithwaite, a radical psychotherapist from the 1960s. Braithwaite is now forgotten, discredited and disgraced and his work is out of print. GMB is fascinated by this fallen figure but also wary, in case the notebooks, which supposedly contain allegations about Braithwaite, are forgeries. Despite his reservations, GMB reads the notebooks and presents them interspersed with his own biographical research into Braithwaite.

The notebooks give an account of events from 1965 by an unnamed woman. She is convinced that Braithwaite, "Britain's most dangerous man," should bear the blame for her sister's recent suicide. In a bid to find out who he is and how he drove her sister over the edge, the woman assumes the name of Rebecca Smyth and arranges a consultation with Braithwaite at his London practice. "Suicide," she writes, "makes Miss Marples of us all. One cannot help but look for clues."

Macrae's novel works on various levels. It is an elaborate, mind-bending guessing game; it is a blackly comic and quietly moving study of a nervous breakdown; and it is a captivating portrait of an egomaniac. If the notebooks depict a gripping chain of events, then the biographical sections expertly flesh out the grotesque, manipulative yet charismatic Braithwaite. Macrae has reliably delivered another work of fiendish fun.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

By: Graeme Macrae Burnet.

Publisher: Biblioasis, 288 pages, $16.95.

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Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet

I realised halfway through Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet, that the ‘story’ went well beyond the novel I held in my hands. It’s one of those books that, as I was reading, I was side-tracked by internet searches. And if you’ve read Case Study , you’ll know that the Googling (and I absolutely couldn’t help myself) highlights just how clever Burnet is.

Case Study is told from three perspectives. It begins with Burnet, who describes how he came across charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite , and was then contacted by a stranger in possession of notebooks belonging to one of Braithwaite’s patients. The stranger urged Burnet to tell the patient’s story and, although Burnet was initially concerned about the authenticity of the notebooks, he did some fact-checking and took on the task.

The notebooks belonged to a young woman who believed that Braithwaite drove her sister to suicide. In her effort to prove his unethical methods, the woman creates an alter ego for herself, who she names Rebecca Smyth, and becomes a patient of Braithwaite.

I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger.

Rebecca’s psychotherapy sessions are described in parallel with the woman’s ‘real’ life, which is conservative and strictly controlled by her father. Within a short time, the imaginary life of Rebecca is far more attractive than her actual staid existence, and she inhabits the persona outside of the therapy room, with some interesting consequences that highlight themes of desire, ego and expectations.

Although Braithwaite is not aware of the ruse, he recognises Rebecca is not being entirely forthcoming.

You can be sure that every client that has ever walked into a therapist’s office has already mentally played out the scene a hundred times, and the idea of leaving without having touched on the very thing that has brought them there is unthinkable.

The story moves back and forth between the woman’s therapy sessions, and the history of Braithwaite’s career. The book is predominantly set in London in the 1960s, but also refers to Braithwaite’s time at university, and his relationship with contemporaries such as R.D. Laing and Robert Linder .

As a therapist, you are thanked for saying things that would earn a guy in a bar a punch on the jaw.

That I struggled to identify what was fact and what was fiction in Case Study is testament to Burnet’s skill and I think allowing myself to overthink (i.e. Google) every detail added to the fun. There’s no real smoke and mirrors on Burnet’s part – he states from the outset his doubts about the authenticity of the notebooks; he describes Braithwaite’s unorthodox opinions; and the notebooks themselves demonstrate Rebecca’s increasingly erratic behaviour. Who to trust? The answer is that you’re safe in the hands of Burnet, a marvelous storyteller.

I received my copy of Case Study from the publisher, Text Publishing, via NetGalley , in exchange for an honest review.

3.5/5 Clever.

My reward was a bowl of blancmange with tinned mandarins. Blancmange is a favourite dish of mine. It requires no effort of mastication. I like to hold a spoonful on my tongue, before letting it slip down my throat, imagining it to be a little ship sliding from its mooring into the open sea.

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7 responses.

I read His Bloody Project and although I didn’t totally love it I would like to read more by Graeme Macrae Burnet. This does sound very tempting, with the complexity not getting in the way of the storytelling.

I’ll get to His Bloody Project at some stage. The odd thing about his writing is that while reading it, it all seems very good but it’s not one of those books where you highlight particular passages or, if you do, read back they’re not particularly impressive… there’s something about the sum-total of this book that made it engrossing.

I am so keen to read this one Kate, I think it sounds fascinating!

Read it for the clever structure alone! Thinking I will press it on my book group because the fact vs fiction debate would be fun.

I’ve just asked Santa for it 🤣

Very keen to read this one.

It’s relatively light and engrossing, but you could also read at a deeper level and go down some psychotherapy rabbit holes!

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AWARD-WINNING INDEPENDENT PUBLISHER

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 . Graeme is also the author of two French-set detective novels:   The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau   (2014) and  The Accident on the A35  (2017). Case Study  is his fourth novel and was longlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.

by Graeme Macrae Burnet

• RRP: £14.99 (print) / £5.99 (ebook)
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN: 9781913393199
• Ebook ISBN: 9781913393205

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LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2022

“A page-turning blast, funny, sinister and perfectly plotted … Rarely has being constantly wrong-footed been so much fun.” James Walton, The Times “A novel of mind-bending brilliance.” Hannah Kent “Fun and funny, sly and serious, a beguiling literary game.”  David Szalay

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.

From the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted His Bloody Project . www.casestudyGMB.com

Prizes and awards

REVIEWS OF Case Study

“Forensic, elusive and mordantly funny … layered with questions about authenticity and the self.” Booker Prize judges

“Encourages us to look more closely at the inherent instability of fiction itself … genuinely affecting … a very funny book.” –NINA ALLAN, GUARDIAN Read more

"Enormous fun … a mystery and a psychological drama wrapped up in one. Case Study is a triumph." – ALEX PRESTON, OBSERVER Read more

"Caustically funny and surprisingly moving, this is one of the finest novels of the year." – CHRISTIAN HOUSE, FINANCIAL TIMES

"Brilliant, bamboozling … Burnet captures his characters’ voices so brilliantly that what might have been just an intellectual game feels burstingly alive and engaging.” – JAKE KERRIDGE, TELEGRAPH

"A masterclass of diversion … blurring the lines of fiction and reality … serious and witty at once … an enthralling read." – HEATHER MCDAID, THE SKINNY

“Undoubtedly one of the best books of the year.” – ALISTAIR BRAIDWOOD, SCOTS WHAY HAE

"A riveting psychological plot ... tortuous, cunning ... clever." – KATE WEBB, THE TLS Read more

“Compelling … I was hooked like a fish.” – LEYLA SANAI, SPECTATOR Read more

“Poses questions about the nature of the self and the authenticity of identity … He is an uncommonly interesting and satisfying novelist.” – ALLAN MASSIE, SCOTSMAN Read more

“Sinister and cleverly done.” – DAILY MAIL

“A page-turning blast, funny, sinister and perfectly plotted … Rarely has being constantly wrong-footed been so much fun.” – JAMES WALTON, THE TIMES Read more

"A wonderful book, very beautifully and intricately written, finely detailed and at times laugh-out-loud funny, populated by satisfying, well-drawn characters." – ARABELLA WEIR

“What a book! … a dizzying experience … The characterisation is superb; so rich … The sense of time and place is also wonderful.” – CATHERINE SIMPSON

"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

“A thrilling investigation into the nature of sanity and identity.” – ALICE O'KEEFFE, THE BOOKSELLER

“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

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• Category: Fiction (General)
• Date Read: 16 January 2022
• Published: 2021

Graeme Macrae Burnet’s fourth novel continues the literary games established in his first three. GMB is the editor of a series of notebooks that come into his possession, and the author of a series of chapters that stand alongside those notes which flesh out the story of Collins Braithwaite, a 1960s psychologist, and his patient ‘Rebecca Smyth’. GMB is contacted by a Mr Martin Grey, suggesting he might be interested in Rebecca’s notebooks, given that they contain allegations against Braithwaite. Grey claims the provenance of the notebooks rest with his cousin. GMB becomes curious, as he has recently discovered a copy of Braithwaite’s book, Untherapy in “the notoriously chaotic Voltaire & Rousseau bookshop in Glasgow.” It was at this point in my reading, only halfway down the first page, that my interest was piqued and I turned to Google. Here are two images of that “notoriously chaotic” bookshop:

It’s immediately obvious that no accurate inventory could ever be made of a shop like this, and so it is ripe for the kind of pretence Burnet practises upon his reader, that what is offered is another found text, and all of it based on real if forgotten history: the notebooks from an obscure cousin, and Braithwaite’s reputation unearthed from the depths of some mouldering book pile in Voltaire and Rousseau’s. GMB is initially sceptical of the notebooks, but his scepticism is put aside upon reading them: “The material was haphazardly arranged,” he states, “but that only added, I thought, to the authenticity of what she had to say.” Other details, such as minor errors, convince GMB of the notebooks’ veracity. But true to Burnet’s style, GMB refuses to say categorically that the notebooks are true.

‘Rebecca Smyth’ is the un nom d’emprunt of the notebooks’ unnamed author. Her sister, Veronica, has committed suicide after attending sessions with Dr Braithwaite. At least, that is the connection ‘Rebecca’ makes after reading Braithwaite’s book, Untherapy , a series of psychological case studies of anonymous patients. ‘Rebecca’ makes the connection between her sister’s circumstances and the details of Braithwaite’s patient, ‘Dorothy’. She decides to get closer to Braithwaite to find out more. However, while her method is clear, her intentions never are. She adopts her name and books a consultation with Braithwaite, attempting to feign mental illnesses of which she has no certain understanding. Braithwaite understands the ‘Rebecca’ offered to him is a pretence, but not the true nature of that pretence. They continue their sessions, settling into a routine in which Braithwaite attempts to help ‘Rebecca’ tease out her issues.

Ironically, it is apparent that ‘Rebecca’ becomes more than a false identity. ‘Rebecca’ becomes a more confident and worldly alter-ego: who can flirt with men and smoke, rather than be shocked at the lewdness of D.H. Lawrence. She draws upon Rebecca to help her establish a relationship with Tom, a photographer, all the while knowing that ‘Rebecca’s’ worldliness outstrips her own conservative resolve.

The issue of identity is the fulcrum upon which the novel pivots. The notion that none of us have a single stable identity has entered popular culture, coming from psychology. Billy Joel sings about it in ‘The Stranger’: “Well, we all have a face / That we hide away forever.” When Luke Skywalker battles Darth Vader in his subconscious while being trained by Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back , it is not Darth Vader he defeats but his own doppelganger: himself. Braithwaite defines his own self in opposition to his father’s quotidian business sensibilities, as an intellect against the bullies who harass him at school, and as the head of the Wagstaff Club at Oxford, which gives him status, but more importantly, a persona he can adopt that gives him easier access to women. Behind that is Braithwaite’s own doppelganger, Ronald Laing, a real psychologist from the 1960s and putatively Braithwaite’s contemporary. Laing held that beliefs and feelings expressed by patients were valid expressions of their experiences, rather than simply symptoms of mental illness. He became associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, which rejected traditional methods of treatment like electro-shock therapy and lobotomy. Braithwaite makes several attempts to ingratiate himself with Laing, and even accuses Laing of stealing his ideas. While Braithwaite’s books are works of chaotic genius, his genius and talent are wavering and unfixed. His own career is in contradistinction to the far more successful career of Laing, the author of The Divided Self , a book that describes the problems of fixing a defined ontological self, particularly for schizophrenic patients. Case Study suggests that the concept of Self is nebulous. Each character engages in self-constructions determined by their needs, uncertainties and situations.

A weakness some readers may perceive in this book is that it is possibly too self-aware, too cerebral and with too little pay-off. Burnet’s His Bloody Project drew comparisons to Umberto Eco, for its cerebral brand of thriller. But Eco knew that if a writer promised a thriller, then no matter what intellectual background formed the balustrade of the plot, it had to be thrilling. In the end, Case Study feels a little underwhelming because ‘Rebecca’s’ revenge is a subtle dish served cold. As always, Burnet covers interesting ground throughout the story before this. The introduction of real people into the plot surely provides relevant insights. At one point in his career, for instance, Braithwaite becomes interested in the work of actors, since actors consciously divide the self and assume other identities. When he befriends Dirk Bogarde, star of the 1961 thriller, Victim , he gains insight from the life of Bogarde who plays a gay man being blackmailed for his sexuality, who was, himself, a gay man who understood the need to create a public persona to enable him to function within society and have a career.

But the notion of created personas and divided selves, while well executed, doesn’t seem enough, when the subject of Veronica’s suicide sits blithely in the background, like Chekov’s gun waiting to be picked up. After all, the comic and entertaining potential of the problem of identity has long been mined successfully. Think of The Importance of Being Earnest or Pygmalion . It is possible to draw upon intellectual movements and weave a satisfying story from that material.

I am wrong entirely in this assessment, I admit, since ‘Rebecca’ acts with all the cerebral calculation the plot demands. But suicide and families engender high emotions, and that’s the river I sat next to as I waited for a body to float by. While Case Study is an accomplished study in character, I felt one more character reveal at the end and a subtle, clever ending left me wanting more.

I don’t know what I wanted.

It was good. The ending was clever.

But I was unsatisfied.

The Divided Self

© 2022 readingproject.neocities.org/

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Case Study Paperback – November 1, 2022

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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 • Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award

SELECTED BY NEW YORK TIMES AS ONE OF 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2022

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.

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Biblioasis
• Publication date November 1, 2022
• Dimensions 5.25 x 0.65 x 8.25 inches
• ISBN-10 1771965207
• ISBN-13 978-1771965200
• See all details

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Editorial Reviews

Praise for  Case Study

" 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." —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 Jury Statement

"A twisting and often wickedly humorous work of crime fiction that meditates on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself." —Gordon Burn Prize Jury Citation

"With its layers of imposture and unreliability, the novel suggests that our personhood is far more malleable than we believe." —New Yorker

"The parallel tracks of Case Study are deeply satisfying because they encompass a sense of how we live day-by-day in doubt, often unaware of our own motivations." —NY Sun

"Macrae's novel works on various levels. It is an elaborate, mind-bending guessing game; it is a blackly comic and quietly moving study of a nervous breakdown; and it is a captivating portrait of an egomaniac ... Macrae has reliably delivered another work of fiendish fun." —Star Tribune

"Burnet is the ultimate unreliable narrator, and Case Study serves as a worthy addition to his oeuvre." —Chicago Review of Books

"The fictional author and Burnet share the same initials, which should be a clue as to how close the book will come to breaking the fourth wall ... The matryoshka-style layering of narratives, each dependent on the other, is engaging and disorienting. Case Study is an immersive novel that stretches its fiction to fact-like proportions." —Foreword Reviews (starred review)

" Case Study is a dizzying dive into British counterculture of the 1960s and the radical anti-psychiatry movement ... wildly inventive and slickly written. The notebooks feel so casually and authentically from the period, with 'Rebecca’s' word choices and the details she includes saying as much about 1960s British society as they do about her place in it. 'Rebecca' is deliciously unreliable as a narrator." —Jessica Brockmole, Historical Novels Review (Editors' Choice)

"Darkly funny and, at times, deeply weird, Case Study is a dense, complicated, singular work of meta-fiction. It asks deep and important questions without ever shoving them down your throat. Most importantly, though, it tells an interesting and engaging story—three of them, in fact. It’s a ride well worth taking, even if it is sometimes quiet and subtle. Case Study is well-deserving of its praise." —Spectrum Culture

"Ironical, intelligent and intriguing from first page to last, the fourth novel from Glasgow-based Graeme Macrae Burnet ... questions the tricky nature of identity." —Winnipeg Free Press

"Burnet evokes a place and an era very nicely, in pitch-perfect prose ... Case Study is an artfully twisted and presented fiction about identity and the stories we tell, and a wonderful evocation of 1960s London." —Complete Review

"Burnet weaves together 'found' documents and the biography of a controversial psychologist to create an indelible portrait of a power struggle in 1960s London." —Vol 1. Brooklyn

" Case Study reflects on relationships of power: the physical power of abusive men over women, the lingering power of memory over oneself." —The Michigan Daily

"It is a truly riveting novel, entertaining as it makes you question everything about it, and beautifully written. There are no wasted words in this book." —Miramichi Reader

"What decidedly it is is an enticing piece of metafiction that is impossible to put down, but not because it offers generated tension that is happily released when order and safety are restored. Instead it tempts us down one fascinating path after another without promising or providing any solutions." —Reviewing the Evidence

"A provocative send-up of midcentury British mores and the roots of modern psychotherapy … brisk and engaging." —Kirkus

"Burnet's deployment of multiple narrative structures, his finely tuned depiction of Braithwaite, and the fascinating revelations of the diarist result in an unforgettable story, one that will rattle readers long after its startling, disorientating ending." —Shelf Awareness

“Encourages us to look more closely at the inherent instability of fiction itself … genuinely affecting … a very funny book.” —Nina Allan, The Guardian

"Burnet propels readers through the novel with his fierce, hilarious intelligence." —Crime Reads

“Brilliant, bamboozling … Burnet captures his characters’ voices so brilliantly that what might have been just an intellectual game feels burstingly alive and engaging.” —Telegraph

“A riveting psychological plot ... tortuous, cunning ... clever. ” —Times Literary Supplement

“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 … Rarely has being constantly wrong-footed been so much fun.” —The Times

“Such is Burnet’s skill that he immediately convinces the reader that everything he is about to say is based on historical fact … brilliantly depicted … intriguing … compulsive reading.” —Irish Times

“You’ll be completely beguiled by this sly, darkly comic offering, with its unreliable narrator and its equally unreliable author.” —Mail on Sunday

“What’s real and what’s not is beside the point in this skillful portrait of a disturbed woman and her encounters with an experimental 1960s psychotherapist … Both strands quickly become compelling … I was hooked like a fish.” —Spectator

"Macrae Burnett has created a dynamic work that has excellent characterisation with acute observation. The writing is layered but there is no use of superfluous words. While the themes are profound, the style is both intriguing and playful. He has created a book that is thought provoking and a compulsive read." —Limerick City and County Libraries, Ireland

Praise for Graeme Macrae Burnet's His Bloody Project

"It’s only a story—or is it? Graeme Macrae Burnet makes such masterly use of the narrative form that the horrifying tale he tells in His Bloody Project ...  seems plucked straight out of Scotland’s sanguinary historical archives.”

—New York Times Book Review

“Both a horrific tale of violence and a rumination on the societal problems for poor sharecroppers of the era.” —TIME

“[A] powerful, absorbing novel … Authors from Henry James to Vladimir Nabokov to Gillian Flynn have used [an unreliable narrator] to induce ambiguity, heighten suspense and fold an alternative story between the lines of a printed text. Mr. Burnet, a Glasgow author, does all of that and more in this page-turning period account of pathos and violence in 19th-century Scotland … [A] cleverly constructed tale … Has the lineaments of the crime thriller but some of the sociology of a Thomas Hardy novel.” —Wall Street Journal

“Recalls William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner in the way it portrays an abused people and makes the ensuing violence understandable … His Bloody Project shows that the power held by landowners and overseers allowed cruelties just like those suffered by the Virginia slaves in Confessions . Halfway between a thriller and a sociological study of an exploitive economic system with eerie echoes to our own time, His Bloody Project is a gripping and relevant read.” —Newsweek

“A thriller with a fine literary pedigree ... His Bloody Project offers an intricate, interactive puzzle, a crime novel written, excuse my British, bloody well.” —Los Angeles Times

From the Back Cover

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 • Longlisted for the 2023 Dublin Literary Award

The Booker-shortlisted author of His Bloody Project blurs the lines between patient and therapist, fiction and documentation, and reality and dark imagination.

About the Author

Excerpt. © reprinted by permission. all rights reserved..

The First Notebook

I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger, and if proved to be right (a rare occurrence admittedly), this notebook might serve as some kind of evidence.

Regrettably, as will become clear, I have little talent for com­position. As I read over my previous sentence I do rather cringe, but if I dilly-dally over style I fear I will never get anywhere. Miss Lyle, my English mistress, used to chide me for trying to cram too many thoughts into a single sentence. This, she said, was a sign of a disorderly mind. ‘You must first decide what it is you wish to say, then express it in the plainest terms.’ That was her mantra, and though it is doubtless a good one, I can see that I have already failed. I have said that I may be putting myself in danger, but there I go, off on an irrelevant digression. Rather than beginning again, however, I shall press on. What matters here is substance rather than style; that these pages constitute a record of what is to occur. It may be that were my narrative too polished, it might lack credibility; that somehow the ring of truth lies in infelicity. In any case, I cannot follow Miss Lyle’s advice, as I do not yet know what it is I wish to say. However, for the sake of anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves reading this, I will endeavour to be clear: to express myself in the plainest terms.

In this spirit, I shall begin by stating the facts. The danger to which I have alluded comes in the person of Collins Braithwaite. You will have heard him described in the press as ‘Britain’s most dangerous man’, this on account of his ideas about psychiatry. It is my belief, however, that it is not merely his ideas that are dangerous. I am convinced, you see, that Dr Braithwaite killed my sister, Veronica. I do not mean that he murdered her in the normal sense of the word, but that he is, nonetheless, as respon­sible for her death as if he had strangled her with his bare hands. Two years ago, Veronica threw herself from the overpass at Bridge Approach in Camden and was killed by the 4.45 to High Barnet. You could hardly imagine a person less likely to commit such an act. She was twenty-six years old, intelligent, successful and passably attractive. Regardless of this, she had, unbeknown to my father and me, been consulting Dr Braithwaite for some weeks. This I know from his own account.

Like most people in England I was familiar with Dr Braithwaite’s uncouth Northern drawl long before I encountered him in person. I had heard him speaking on the wireless, and had even once seen him on television. The programme was a discussion of psychiatry hosted by Joan Bakewell.* Braithwaite’s appearance was no more attractive than his voice. He wore an open-necked shirt and no jacket. His hair, which reached to his collar, was dishevelled, and he smoked constantly. His features were large, as if they had been exaggerated by a caricaturist, but there was something, even on television, that drew one’s eyes to him. I was only vaguely aware of the other guests in the studio. I remember less of what he actually said than his manner of delivering it. He had the air of a man to whom it would be futile to offer resistance. He spoke with a weary authority, as if tired of explaining himself to his inferiors. The participants were seated in a semi-circle with Miss Bakewell in the centre. While the others sat up straight, as if attending church, Dr Braithwaite slouched in his seat like a bored schoolboy, his chin slumped on the palm of his hand. He appeared to regard the other contribu­tors with a mixture of contempt and boredom. Towards the end of the programme, he gathered up his smoking materials and walked off the set, muttering an expletive that there is no need to repeat here. Miss Bakewell was taken aback, but quickly recov­ered her composure and remarked that it was an admission of the poverty of her guest’s ideas that he was unwilling to engage in debate with his peers.

The following day’s newspapers were filled with condemna­tion of Dr Braithwaite’s behaviour: he was the embodiment of everything that was wrong with modern Britain; his books were filled with the most obscene ideas and displayed the basest view of human nature. Naturally, the following day I visited Foyle’s during my lunch hour and asked for a copy of his most recent book, which laboured under the unappealing title of Untherapy . The cashier handled the volume as though it carried the danger of infection, and gave me a disapproving look I had not expe­rienced since I acquired a copy of Mr Lawrence’s disreputable novel. My purchase remained under wraps until I was safely ensconced in my room after supper that night.

I should say that, prior to this, my knowledge of psychiatry was exclusively derived from those scenes in films in which a patient reclines on a settee and recounts her dreams to a bearded physician with a Germanic accent. Perhaps for this reason, I found the opening part of Untherapy difficult to follow. It was full of unfamiliar words, and the sentences were so long and convoluted that the author would have benefited from follow­ing Miss Lyle’s advice. The only thing I gleaned from the intro­duction was that Braithwaite had not even wanted to write this book in the first place. His ‘visitors’, as he called them, were individuals, not ‘case studies’ to be paraded like sideshow freaks. If he now set out these stories, it was for the sole purpose of defending his ideas against the scorn poured on them by the Establishment (a word he used a great deal). He declared him­self to be ‘an untherapist’: his task was to convince people that they did not need therapy; his mission was to bring down the ‘jerry-built edifice’ of psychiatry. This struck me as a most pecu­liar position to adopt, but, as I have said, I am not well versed in the topic. The book, he wrote, could be seen as a companion to his previous work, and consisted of a series of narratives based on relationships he had entered into with troubled individuals. Naturally, the names and certain identifying details had been changed, but the fundamentals of each story were, he insisted, true.

Having got past the baffling opening section, I found these stories frightfully compelling. I suppose there is something reassuring about reading about those duds who make one’s own eccentricities pale by comparison. By the time I was half­way through I felt positively normal. It was only when I came to the penultimate chapter that I found myself reading about Veronica. The most sensible thing, I think, is simply to insert these pages here:

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Biblioasis (November 1, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1771965207
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1771965200
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.65 x 8.25 inches
• #1,782 in Historical British & Irish Literature
• #3,983 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
• #23,396 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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