Benbecula - by Graeme MacRae Burnet (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Booker-nominated Graeme Macrae Burnet returns to the historic Scotland of His Bloody Project to tell the multi-layered story of madness and murder in the MacPhee family.

Summer 1857. Angus MacPhee returns from a fortnight's work as a servant at a house a few miles away. He seems to have lost his mind. His family are forced to keep him shackled to his bed. When he appears to have come to his senses he is allowed to go at large, but his erratic behaviour gives rise to suggestions that he should be confined in an asylum. Neither the family nor the local community are able to meet the required costs.

Liniclate, 1862. Malcolm MacPhee is living alone in the house where his brother's madness led to horrifying ends. His only contact with the outside world are a neighbour and the local priest. Isolated, ostracised by the small community, Malcolm is haunted by visions of his family's fate. Is he afflicted by the same madness? Worse, there are questions about his sister, Marion. Malcolm says she left long ago with their brother John, but no one saw her board the ship from Lochmaddy. Has something more sinister occurred?

In Benbecula, Booker-nominated author Graeme Macrae Burnet returns to the historic Scotland of His Bloody Project to tell, for the first time, the story of the MacPhee family. Drawing on letters, asylum records, postmortem reports, and witness statements, Burnet constructs a beguilingly layered narrative about madness, murder, and the uncertain nature of the self.

Review Quotes

Praise for Graeme Macrae Burnet

"You can gulp down A Case of Matricide in one sitting, as the prose style seems to demand. But linger over Burnet's novel, and its real pleasures emerge."

--Sarah Weinman, New York Times

"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 . . . A diverting novel, overflowing with clever plays on and inversions of tropes of English intellectual and social life during the postwar decades."

--Christian Lorentzen, 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 Judges

"A stylish, atmospheric mystery with a startling twist . . . [The Disappearance of Adèle Bedeau] satisfies like Simenon and surprises like Ruth Rendell. I can't give it any higher praise."

--NPR

"A remarkable crime trilogy of doublings and disappearance . . . These are crime novels in which identities are unstable, evidence is slippery and solutions are obscure."

--Nicholas Clee, Times Literary Supplement

"Burnet propels readers through [Case Study] with his fierce, hilarious intelligence."

--Crime Reads

About the Author

Graeme Macrae Burnet was born in Kilmarnock, Scotland, and now lives in Glasgow. His Bloody Project, his second novel, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016, won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award 2016, and was shortlisted for the LA Times Book Awards 2017. His fourth novel, Case Study, was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 and was included in the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022.