Black Bag

''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'' GQ

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.