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Longlisted for the 2026 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction - A Globe 100 Best Book of 2025
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.
During the summer of 1857 on the distant Scottish Island of Benbecula, Angus MacPhee, returning from a fortnight's work at a house a few miles away, seems to have lost his mind, forcing his family to keep him shackled to his bed. When he is finally allowed to go at large, his erratic behaviour leads to the conviction that he should be committed to an asylum.
Five years later, Malcolm MacPhee is living alone in the house where his brother's madness led to horrifying ends. Isolated, ostracised by his small community, Malcolm is haunted, the stench of his brother's crimes lingering as the reek cleaves to the thatch. Is he afflicted by the same madness? And to where has his sister Marion disappeared?
Drawing on letters, asylum records, and witness statements, Graeme Macrae Burnet returns to the historic Scotland of His Bloody Project to construct a beguilingly layered narrative about madness, murder, and the uncertain nature of the self.
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