His Bloody Project

‘A real box of tricks...a truly ingenious thriller.’ -- Jake Kerridge * Express * ‘A gripping crime story, a deeply imagined historical novel, and gloriously written all in one tour-de-force of a book.’ * Herald, Book of the Year * ‘The book’s pretence at veracity, as well as being a literary jeux d’esprit, brings an extraordinary historical period into focus, while the multiple unreliable perspectives are designed to keep the audience wondering, throughout the novel and beyond. This is a fiendishly readable tale that richly deserves the wider attention the Booker has brought it.’ * Guardian * ‘[His Bloody Project] isn’t a thriller in any normal sense of the word. It engrosses the reader by means quite different from suspense, and the mysteries it presents are of a kind that can’t be neatly solved…In drawing attention to this riveting, dark and ingeniously constructed novel, the Man Booker judges have done readers hungry for new and serious fiction a tremendous favour.’ * Sunday Times * ‘It’s a riveting historical whydunnit that plants readers among the dirt and injustice of Victorian-era crofting life’ * NZ Listener * ‘Accounts, witness reports, and a trial, all set down as in an authentic case, gradually reveal a truth that is chilling yet inevitable.’ -- Jane Sullivan * Australian Book Review, Books of the Year 2016 * ‘I also adored Graeme Macrae Burnet’s maddeningly brilliant His Bloody Project, and found myself utterly absorbed in the 1869 case of Roderick Macrae, accused of murder in a Scottish highland community…A cunning and unreliable tale that still bloody nags at me.’ -- Hannah Kent * The Books We Loved 2016, Sydney Morning Herald * ‘A dark, unforgettable picture of the crofter’s life in 19th-century Scotland.’ -- James Button * The Books We Loved 2016, Sydney Morning Herald * ‘This is ultimately the book’s great strength—its unwillingness to offer a definitive explanation for its protagonist’s shocking deeds. After hinting at possible motives and offering a basis for a countervailing case of insanity, the book finally gestures towards the impossibility of knowing the forces at play in another person’s mind.’ * Law Institute Journal * ‘Transporting and deliciously frustrating—I loved the way Burnet played with notions of doubt, criminality and justice.’ -- Hannah Kent * 2016 Staff Picks, Kill Your Darlings * ‘A retelling of a gory triple murder that’ll indulge your true crime craving.’ ‘A remote crofting village in nineteenth-century Scotland, and a shocking and seemingly inexplicable act of murder by a teenage villager. Accounts, witness reports, and a trial, all set down as in an authentic case, gradually reveal a truth that is chilling yet inevitable: the power of a feudal system that supports petty tyrants, stereotypes its criminals, and grinds down its victims.’ -- Jane Sullivan * Australian Book Review * ‘A powerful novel…keeps the reader guessing to the end as it examines the legal process as it relates to the class divide of the time.’ * Otago Daily Times * ‘In exploring the duality of good and evil, Burnet is tapping into a rich seam of Scottish literature, from James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, to Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde…His Bloody Project also illustrates what fans know about crime writing: it’s a great way to explore the depths of a society: the tensions that animate it, the structures and hierarchies that underpin it.’ * Metro *