Product Description
Black Bag (Hardcover)
Author: Luke Kennard
Format: Hardcover
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026
‘A triumph of deadpan comedy . . . As surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show
A penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend’s students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences.
A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor’s childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation . . .
A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.
‘The funniest and smartest novel I’ve read in a while’ — ZADIE SMITH
‘Black Bag made me laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times . . . I loved its inventive originality and its ambition: it is very powerfully worth your time’ — KATHERINE RUNDELL
‘It is excellent, both funny and genuinely clever . . . go on, treat yourself’ — MARK HADDON
‘A campus novel for our end times . . . Black Bag fizzes with wit and invention’ — Observer
‘s Jesse Armstrong’ — Sunday Times
‘Hilarious and poignant . . . Luke’s prose ripples with unusual images and wry aphorisms. An ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness and love’ — TLS
‘With all the fuss about the manosphere, Black Bag comes as comic relief . . . profound as well as funny’ — Standard
‘Had me laughing from page one’ — New Statesman
‘Very, very funny’ — GQ
‘Winningly wry, both vulnerable and dyspeptic’ — Mail on Sunday
‘A masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today . . . Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other’ — JOE DUNTHORNE, author of Submarine
‘This brilliant novel made me laugh, think, worry about a man on a swan pedalo and almost shed a tear into the dark leather of my own consciousness’ — WILL ASHON, author of The Passengers
‘Absurdly good. Peep Show meets Fight Club. The novel of male interiority we’ve all been waiting for’ — CLARE POLLARD, author of Delphi
‘Ya gotta read Black Bag’ — FERN BRADY
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