Black Bag by Luke Kennard

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 . . . I loved its inventive originality and its ambition: it is very powerfully worth your time" - Katherine Rundell. This warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

A penniless and out-of-work actor takes on a peculiar job for Dr Blend, a university professor conducting a psychological experiment. The experiment involves the actor being zipped into an oversized bag and placed at the back of a lecture hall during a series of autumn term lectures. This role, eagerly accepted, soon leads to unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism begins to develop her own research questions, particularly concerning the possibility of loving someone secreted away inside a black bag. Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate envisions a way to monetize this unusual situation.

Praised for its inventive originality, ambition, and triumph of deadpan comedy, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, but written with the comic instincts of Jesse Armstrong. The prose ripples with unusual images and wry aphorisms, offering an ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness, and love. It is described as profound as well as funny, providing comic relief in discussions about the manosphere.

"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.

Specifications:

• Author: Luke Kennard
• Publisher: John Murray
• Publication Date: 12 March 2026
• Language: English
• Print Length: 400 pages
• Binding: Hardcover
• Dimensions: 13.2 x 3.6 x 21.4 cm
• Weight: 500 g
• ISBN 10: 1399826115
• ISBN 13: 978-1399826112

This novel is a must-read for fans of witty, original, and thought-provoking literature.