Case Study

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 GORDON BURN PRIZE

“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 & mordantly funny text(s) layered with questions about authenticity & the self.” — The 2022 Booker Prize judges

°°°

'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 suspects charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite of involvement in a death in her family. Determined to find out more, she becomes a client of his under a false identity. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything.

In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents both sides: the woman’s notes & the life of Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling, page-turning & wickedly humorous meditation on the nature of sanity, identity & truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.

°°°

Graeme Macrae Burnet has been nominated for the Booker Prize twice - shortlisted in 2016 & longlisted in 2022. He is among Britain's leading contemporary novelists, achieving bestseller status in several countries.

Best known for his dazzling Booker-shortlisted second novel, His Bloody Project (2015), he is also the author of two novels 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). His 4th novel, Case Study (2021), consists of a series of notebooks apparently sent to the author in 2020 to aid his research into a rogue 1960s psychotherapist.