Black Bag
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026
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Black Bag
Narrated by:
Luke Kennard
Buy Now for $28.28
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Narrated by:
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Luke Kennard
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By:
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Luke Kennard
Summary
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOLLINGER EVERYMAN WODEHOUSE 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 . . . 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
'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' 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 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©2026 Luke Kennard
Critic Reviews
The funniest and smartest novel I've read in a while (Zadie Smith)
[An] ecccentric, amusingly slanted campus novel . . . the action escalates, sometimes into absurdity, always hilariously . . . poignant . . . The bug-eyed hypercapitalism of the internet is gleefully and sinisterly skewered . . . Luke is also a widely admired poet, and his prose ripples with unusual images and wry aphorisms . . The tone throughout is delightfully mordant . . . This is a very modern novel with a comfortingly familiar core: that of an ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness and love
Gleefully absurd . . . a triumph of deadpan comedy . . . From this gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life . . . Kennard is superb at capturing [a] chaotic interior life . . . The novel's off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show's Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard's hands, the bag contains a lot, and he's so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force (Johanna Thomas-Corr)
Both surrealist and campus-based . . . it's Gogol with millenial angst. The narrator knows he's in a novel . . . which gives it a lovely Shandean quality. Very, very funny (Giles Coren)
Hilarious . . . Both [of Luke's] works operate as Black Mirror-style satires of late-capitalist, technocratic societies, where discontented thirtysomethings find themselves embroiled in bizarre social experiments. This is all tremendous good fun, with razor-sharp jokes and absurd scenarios galore. It is a campus novel for our end times, packed with keen insights into the current state of art, masculinity and friendship . . . Black Bag fizzes with wit and invention and winningly communicates a very human concern for meaning and connection. In 1967 "Black Bag" apparently took a whole semester to win over his fellow classmates, but this novel will gain your affections on the first page
So bizarre yet felt so real, a breath of fresh air.
The humour.
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Unique, funny and a bit poignant
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Bonkers story yet so deep
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Fabulous writing
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Good book, terrible narration
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