In Luke Kennard's audacious new novel, 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.
Read MorePraise for The Transition:Extremely smart and extremely funny, a brilliant dismantling of our corporatized century. A book like The Transition is not just a ray of light - it's utterly vital - Paul Murray, author of The Bee StingDisquieting and witty but with such tenderness at its core that it's often heart-stopping. Gorgeous stuff. I devoured it - Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious HeresiesA tremendous novel - funny, shrewd, poignantly destabilising -- and charged with Luke Kennard's laconic wit and his gimlet eye for the foibles and nuances of human behaviour. A huge success - William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart