Black Bag

An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological 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 Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall 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?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing 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.

Author Biography

Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist. In 2014 he was named one of the Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in their once-per-decade list. His collection, Cain, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and described by Alan Hollinghurst as “the cleverest and funniest thing I’ve read this year,” and Notes on the Sonnets won the Forward prize for Best Poetry Collection in 2021. The Transition, his first novel, was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. The Book of Jonah, his new poetry collection, will be published by Picador in 2025. Luke Kennard lives in Birmingham, UK, where he teaches Creative Writing at Birmingham University.