A playful and entertaining book, from the author of the 2016 award-winning novel His Bloody Project.

Having previously discovered a controversial but fascinating book by the disgraced yet extraordinary psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite, the author (ie Macrae Burnet) is offered some contemporary notebooks which are apparently the diary of a young woman who was determined to expose the therapist for causing the suicide of her sister. The notebooks reveal a sadly naïve young woman with a determination to avenge her sibling. Painfully repressed but resourceful, as a ruse to deceive Collins Braithwaite, she adopts an alternative personality “Rebecca”, an hilariously outgoing liberal character who is the complete opposite of the diarist. As “Rebecca” the diarist is so convincing she attracts the attention of a potential lover, but after multiple sessions with Collins Braithwaite begins to confuse herself with “Rebecca”.

Between the notebook chapters, the extraordinary life of Collins Braithwaite is described, completely fictional but utterly convincing with real historical figures woven into the story and “factual” footnotes for references. Braithwaite is a magnificent creation, appalling but believable, a self-confessed charlatan but remarkably perceptive and understanding of others whilst being completely deluded about his own importance.

Macrae Burnet has brilliantly created a delightfully complex, multi layered novel, with unreliable sources and self-shifting characters and yet presents a fluent, thoroughly engrossing story that is in turns funny, disturbing and sad, which also entertainingly tests the reader’s sense of reality.