Black Bag by Luke Kennard (Hardcover)

The funniest and smartest novel I've read in a while' ZADIE SMITH'Black Bag made me laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times. It's brilliant, a triumph of a book . .

. I loved its inventive originality and its ambition: it is very powerfully worth your time' KATHERINE RUNDELL'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'Very, very funny' GQA 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.