The Accident on the A35 (The Gorski Novels)

Product Information

Instead it’s a psychological study of a small town detective in France and of a teenage male facing an existential crisis - Catcher in the Rye and Camus’ Outsider. Ex-Waterstones bookseller Graeme Macrae Burnet provoked a literary sensation on the publication of his masterful, multi-viewpoint tale, seeing His Bloody Project not only shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016 but going on to hold the public vote until ultimately pipped by Paul Beatty's satire The Sellout. Neatly, in a plot already resting on old books, what people are reading – Balzac, Baudelaire, Zola and Sartre – enjoyably inflects both prose and plot. Do you feel weighed down by stress and pressure, held back by judgement and lack of opportunity, and critcised by everyone – including yourself? In His Bloody Project, shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker prize, he presented himself as the editor of historical documents relating to an ancestor apparently accused of a triple killing in the mid 19th-century Scottish Highlands.

But the enterprise of his publisher Saraband (once of Glasgow, now based in Salford), the wisdom of the 2016 panel – and the quality of His Bloody Project, about a crofter’s son bound for the gallows after a triple murder to which he has confessed guilt but not motive – have won Burnet a keen audience for his next move.Graeme is also the author of two French-set detective novels: The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau (2014) and The Accident on the A35 (2017). With hints of a second manuscript sent to the publisher by Raymond Burnet, there is sure to be another book so I'll be interested to see if there is still more to this story to come.

It could well have to do with the translation, but as well as being unable to get close to the characters, I couldn’t raise any enthusiasm for the plot. Graeme Burnet uses this as a clever structural device to add mystery and intrigue to what otherwise would be a straightforward police mystery novel.His second novel, His Bloody Project, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2016, won the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award 2016, and has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Awards 2016. In the vast majority of cases, the perpetrator of a crime is either known from the outset, or, in the case of petty theft or burglary, unlikely ever to be apprehended. Main Hi Kahaani Hoon”, an Audible Original is a weekly storytelling show of 20 episode from Audible, written-created-performed by Major Akhill Pratap; an ex-Army Officer popularly known as The Soldier and The Storyteller.

A stray look from a stranger never ceases to alarm Raymond, especially as he follows-up on an address he found in his father’s desk. I was particularly struck by Macrae Burnet's use of double negatives that I noticed happening with frequency. Now being described as a series, this latest work focuses on an investigation being carried out by Chief Inspector Georges Gorski, the head of the town’s police force. As the reader we are considering the macrocosm of Graeme Macrae Burnet, the overall author, manipulating the characters of Raymond Brunet, the sub author, and the smaller characters of George Gorski and Raymond Brunet.

Raymond goes through life as though he is the main character and becomes frustrated whenever he realises that he might not be. I think Graeme Macrae Burnet has done a really skilful job of depicting the characters and the places and to me this is the book’s strength. Simenon fans will feel at home in the claustrophobic and petty-minded atmosphere of the French provinces.

The book is presented as a manuscript come to light years after the author's death, and translated by Burnet from the original French. The master of smart, darkly humorous psychological suspense, Graeme Macrae Burnet is an award-winning Scottish novelist, best known for his 2016 Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel His Bloody Project.Raymond, meanwhile, finds a scrap of paper containing a scribbled address in a desk drawer in his father’s study.