About this item
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 A brutal triple murder in a remote Scottish farming community in 1869 leads to the arrest of seventeen-year-old Roderick Macrae. There is no question that Macrae committed this terrible act. What would lead such a shy and intelligent boy down this bloody path? And will he hang for his crime?Presented as a collection of documents discovered by the author, His Bloody Project opens with a series of police statements taken from the villagers of Culdie, Ross-shire. They offer conflicting impressions of the accused; one interviewee recalls Macrae as a gentle and quiet child, while another details him as evil and wicked. Chief among the papers is Roderick Macrae's own memoirs where he outlines the series of events leading up to the murder in eloquent and affectless prose. There follow medical reports, psychological evaluations, a courtroom transcript from the trial, and other documents that throw both Macrae's motive and his sanity into question.Graeme Macrae Burnet's multilayered narrative - centered around an unreliable narrator - will keep the reader guessing to the very end. His Bloody Project is a deeply imagined crime novel that is both thrilling and luridly entertaining from an exceptional new voice.
About the Author
Graeme was born and brought up in the industrial town of Kilmarnock in the west of Scotland and now lives in Glasgow. He has also lived in the Czech Republic, France, Portugal and London.
His first novel The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau - "a captivating psychological thriller" (The Herald) - is set in the small town of Saint-Louis in France and tells the story of the disappearance of the eponymous waitress and the impact of this event on the lives of an ill-at-ease outsider, Manfred Baumann, and a disenchanted detective, Georges Gorski. It was something of cult hit.
His second novel, His Bloody Project, was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker prize. It tells the story of a triple murder carried out by a seventeen-year-old crofter in a tiny Scottish village in 1869. It has been called "astonishing" (The Telegraph) , "fiendishly readable" (The Guardian) , "spellbinding" (The Financial Times) and "masterly" (New York Times) , and is set to be translated into more than a dozen languages. It has also been optioned for the screen by Synchronicity Films.
He is currently working on a follow-up to his first novel.
