"It's only a story - or is it? Graeme Macrae Burnet makes such masterly use of the narrative form that the horrifying tale he tells in HIS BLOODY PROJECT, a finalist for this year's Man Booker Prize, seems plucked straight out of Scotland's sanguinary historical archives."
Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review 

"[A] powerful, absorbing novel...Fiction authors from Henry James to Vladimir Nabokov to Gillian Flynn have used [an unreliable narrator] to induce ambiguity, heighten suspense and fold an alternative story between the lines of a printed text. Mr. Burnet, a Glasgow author, does all of that and more in this page-turning period account of pathos and violence in 19th-century Scotland... [A] cleverly constructed tale...Has the lineaments of the crime thriller but some of the sociology of a Thomas Hardy novel."
Tom Nolan, Wall Street Journal

"...recalls William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner in the way it portrays an abused people and makes the ensuing violence understandable...Bloody Project shows that the power held by landowners and overseers allowed cruelties just like those suffered by the Virginia slaves in Confessions. Halfway between a thriller and a sociological study of an exploitive economic system with eerie echoes to our own time, His Bloody Project is a gripping and relevant read."
Newsweek

"Burnet is a writer of great skill and authority...few readers will be able to put down His Bloody Project as it speeds towards a surprising (and ultimately puzzling) conclusion."
Financial Times