Black Bag

Black Bag made me laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times. Its 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 connectionObserver

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 Armstrong . . . [Kennard is] so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de forceSunday Times

Hilarious and poignant . . . Lukes 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 loveTLS

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.