Case Study

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 Jury Statement

Fun and funny, sly and serious, a beguiling literary game that manages to say more about the nature of the self than any number of more self-consciously solemn works.

David Szalay

A thrilling investigation into sanity and identity.

Alice O’Keefe, Bookseller

The defining essence of Burnet’s work to date is to be found in this kind of literary gamesmanship, a brand of metatextuality that is as much about exploiting the possibilities of the novel form as it is about blurring the boundaries between appearance and reality… Burnet has always delighted in undermining such easy assumptions, and in Case Study he ups the stakes still further, providing a veritable layer cake of possible realities to get lost in…Entertaining and mindfully engrossing in equal measure.

Guardian

Burnet’s triumph is that it’s a page-turning blast, funny, sinister and perfectly plotted so as to reveal – or withhold – its secrets in a consistently satisfying way. It also does 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.

James Walton, The Times

A disorienting, darkly funny novel, constructing a tale about the labyrinth of identity within the game-like frame of metafiction.

Age