Black Bag

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026

'The funniest and smartest novel I've read in a while' ZADIE SMITH

'Black Bag made me laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times. It's brilliant, a triumph of a book . . . I loved its inventive originality and its ambition: it is very powerfully worth your time' KATHERINE RUNDELL

'Ya gotta read Black Bag' FERN BRADY

'A campus novel for our end times . . . Black Bag fizzes with wit and invention' Observer

'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's Jesse Armstrong . . . [Kennard is] so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page' Sunday Times

'Hilarious and poignant . . . Luke's prose ripples with unusual images and wry aphorisms. The tone throughout is delightfully mordant . . . 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 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.

'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