Black Bag

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026

The funniest and smartest novel Ive read in a while ZADIE SMITH

Black Bag made me laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times . . . I loved its inventive originality and its ambition: it is very powerfully worth your time KATHERINE RUNDELL

Ya gotta read Black BagFERN BRADY

A campus novel for our end times . . . Black Bag fizzes with wit and inventionObserver

A triumph of deadpan comedy . . . As surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthys Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Shows Jesse ArmstrongSunday Times

Hilarious and poignant . . . Lukes prose ripples with unusual images and wry aphorisms. An ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness and loveTLS

With all the fuss about the manosphere, Black Bag comes as comic relief . . . profound as well as funnyStandard

Had me laughing from page oneNew Statesman

Very, very funny GQ

Winningly wry, both vulnerable and dyspepticMail on Sunday

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 Blends 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 actors 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.

A masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today . . . Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no otherJOE DUNTHORNE, author of Submarine

This brilliant novel made me laugh, think, worry about a man on a swan pedalo and almost shed a tear into the dark leather of my own consciousness WILL ASHON, author of The Passengers

Absurdly good. Peep Show meets Fight Club. The novel of male interiority weve all been waiting for CLARE POLLARD, author of Delphi