Black Bag: A Novel

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychology experiment. What could possibly go wrong?

In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized leather bag, sitting silently at the back of the lecture hall, over a series of Fall lectures?

The role, eagerly accepted by our narrator, soon yields unexpected consequences, from a professor of post-humanism developing a research question of her own—can you fall in love with someone secreted away inside a black bag?—to the actor’s childhood friend forming an unnerving vision for monetizing this bizarre new situation . . . 

A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter romance, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.