# Black Bag

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/luke-kennard/black-bag/9781399826136

![Black Bag](https://quivercdn.com/covers/john-murray/luke-kennard/black-bag_978-13-9982-613-6.jpg?v=2026-04-28%2019%3A12%3A09)

- Book: [Black Bag](https://www.bookquiver.com/luke-kennard/black-bag) ([Black Bag.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/luke-kennard/black-bag.md))
- Authors: [Luke Kennard](https://www.bookquiver.com/luke-kennard)
- Publisher: john_murray
- Medium: ebook
- ISBN: 978-13-9982-613-6
- Published: 2026-03-12
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: E-book

## Description

'A campus novel for our end times . . . Black Bag fizzes with wit and invention and winningly communicates a very human concern for meaning and connection' 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. A brilliant comic tour de force' Sunday Times 'Hilarious and poignant . . . Luke's 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' TLS 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.