Black Bag by Luke Kennard 2026 Paperback ...

Black Bag: LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026

by Luke Kennard (Author) Format: Paperback

Review

[An] ecccentric, amusingly slanted campus novel . . . the action escalates, sometimes into absurdity, always hilariously . . . poignant . . . The bug-eyed hypercapitalism of the internet is gleefully and sinisterly skewered . . . Luke is also a widely admired poet, and his 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 ― Times Literary Supplement

Gleefully absurd . . . a triumph of deadpan comedy . . . From this gloriously unhinged premise, Kennard explores broader questions of identity, masculinity and the pursuit of meaning in art and in life . . . Kennard is superb at capturing [a] chaotic interior life . . . The novel's off-kilter humour combines minute social observation with incongruous ideas, drawing on a wide sphere of reference from religion to pornography. Conceptually, Black Bag is as surreal and ambitious as Tom McCarthy's Remainder, only written by someone with the comic instincts of Peep Show's Jesse Armstrong. But beneath the playfulness lies a thoughtful, tender meditation on the difficulty of being a man in the modern world: how to find purpose, how to make art that matters and how to connect with other people when you suspect you might not possess a fully formed self to offer them. In Kennard's hands, the bag contains a lot, and he's so generous with the jokes that I found myself laughing on almost every page. A brilliant comic tour de force -- Johanna Thomas-Corr ― Sunday Times

Hilarious . . . Both [of Luke's] works operate as Black Mirror-style satires of late-capitalist, technocratic societies, where discontented thirtysomethings find themselves embroiled in bizarre social experiments. This is all tremendous good fun, with razor-sharp jokes and absurd…