LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 GORDON BURN PRIZE 'A page-turning blast.' Times 'Genuinely affecting ... a very funny book.' Guardian 'Burstingly alive and engaging.' Telegraph FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BOOKER PRIZE-SHORTLISTED HIS BLOODY PROJECT. '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 and the life of Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling, page-turning and wickedly humorous meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.

We were decidedly mixed in our opinions about Case Study when our conversation started, but analyzing the book led us deeper and deeper into its rich complexity. The novel is divided between two sections: the diaristic narrative of 'Rebecca Smyth' - whose sister recently committed suicide - as she attends therapy sessions with the man she thinks is responsible for the tragedy, the cultural bad boy Collins Braithwaite, and a historian offering a biography of Braithwaite's rise and fall. What first intrigued us was how we felt about Rebecca. Different readers saw her as either a growing woman finding her voice or a sociopath enacting an elaborate revenge plot, and when we explored each perspective, we found both were defensible. Burnet does just an amazing job of using his relative narrators to leave ambiguities and sow doubt. We really enjoyed finding all the interesting traces -- the fact that we can't know if Rebecca deliberately approached Braithwaite's other clients, how good Rebecca is at lying when she needs to (at her job or to Braithwaite), how stark the contrast is between Rebecca's feigned madness vs her actual weakness. Burnet uses the therapy center of the book to ask interesting questions about identity -- to what extent is Rebecca able to find a new version of herself because she's attached to Braithwaite's idea of disparate selves? How much is Braithwaite inhabiting different identities at different parts of his life? What are we to make of Rebecca's description of her mother's death -- did she actually kill her mother or just react in shock to her accidental fall? Perhaps most strikingly is how little information we get about Rebecca's sister given that she ostensibly is motivating the entire plot. Despite having her sister and her therapist present, we never really get any access to her interiority other than subtle clues to the depression that seems to run through the family. Even the historian's 'neutral' position was interrogated given the apparent satisfaction in his tone at Braithwaite's return to his home town in failure. The novel was a puzzle box that we kept finding new clues in and even minor scenes (Rebecca's experiences with her younger cousins, the theatre job, the last scene with the historian encountering Rebecca) kept revealing new information and changing our opinions. Ultimately, we had to give a tip of the hat to Burnet's skill. This novel isn't going to be for everyone, but if you like ambiguous stories that won't settle for one interpretation, this is a novel for you.