CASE STUDY

GRAEME MACRAE BURNET

Saraband, 320pp, £14.99 The frame of Case Study is that the author of the novel we are reading is writing a biography of a disgraced 1960s psychiatrist called Collins Braithwaite and has been sent notebooks detailing another woman’s investigations into Braithwaite whom she believes drove her sister to kill herself. ‘Suicide makes Miss Marples of us all,’ observes the patientdetective, a mousy spinster whose assumption of a false identity leads to a seeming discovery of another self. Braithwaite, a misogynistic workingclass Northerner, tangles with real-life characters including RD Laing, Colin Wilson and Joan Bakewell. Leyla Sanai in the Spectator asked of the psychiatrist: ‘Did he ever exist? And if not, does this make the story any less intriguing? The answer to that is a resounding “no”. I was hooked like a fish.’ Jake Kerridge in the Daily

Telegraph wrote that while the reader ‘is constantly aware... of the tricksy contrivances by which Burnet bamboozles you over who to believe… he captures his characters’ voices so brilliantly that what might have been just an intellectual game feels burstingly alive and engaging.’ James Walton in the Times described how Burnet’s previous novel, His Bloody

Project, was wrongly shelved in true crime by some booksellers. He suggested that Case Study might also be mistaken for non-fiction, advising readers ‘to check in the psychology section because it’s certainly worth finding’. He praised the novel for doing ‘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.’