Black BagLuke KennardLabel: John Murray Publishers LtdDescription: '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.
