Black Bag

Black Bag is a masterpiece from one of the best writers at work today. In his endlessly quotable prose, Kennard explores modern masculinity with compassion and brutal honesty, warmth and despair - through a narrator who, on every page, discovers his true self and simultaneously buries it. Wildly original and funny, yet always underpinned by depth of feeling, this is a novel like no other -- Joe Dunthorne, author of SUBMARINE
Equal parts charming and unhinged, Black Bag is the perfect novel for anyone who has ever felt like 'someone is constantly slapping me in the stomach with an old brown shoe.' This is one of hundreds (thousands?) of quotable lines from an immensely talented writer to watch. Luke Kennard, I will follow you anywhere -- Ruth Madievsky, author of ALL NIGHT PHARMACY
A stylish, fun, and incisive examination of masculinity, modernity, and attempting to make a living as a creative. It's also a weird little book about and, presumably for, sickos. Reading it hits like a concussion that makes you stranger but more compassionate. Easily the sharpest, funniest thing I've read all year -- Calvin Kasulke, author of SEVERAL PEOPLE ARE TYPING
How much can you fit in a large leather satchel? Luke Kennard suggests, when said bag is zipped up around the body of an out-of-work actor trying to find his way, the answer is near infinite: humor, dear friendship, frustrated desire, a talking dog, a wad of cash, hallucinogens, ambition, AI, humility, and no shortage of heart. Black Bagcarried me along with a tremendously deft hand: it had me laughing, unnerved, and hopeful as it galloped through a true and strange world. This book left me reckoning with what to make of the society outside my proverbial eye slits, and what, with some effort, we might make of it still -- Emily Nemens, author of THE CACTUS LEAGUE
What's most extraordinary about Black Bag isn't just its wry discursions to the psychology classroom, the sex dungeon, or the Swedish sawmill of the mind - though these are rendered with such phosphorescent wit that I could've read a book's worth of each. In Black Bag, we're treated to an uncommonly funny and deeply necessary snapshot of masculinity no more objectionable nor perfect than a black leather bag. Whoever thinks men aren't writing fiction clearly needs to read Luke Kennard -- Rafael Frumkin, author of CONFIDENCE
This book walks and talks like a comedic masterpiece. Part SNL sketch, part Spike Jonze film, Black Bag punks everyone and everything, taking aim at high tech, higher ed, and modern-day masculinity along the way. It's also just plain hot . . . The smart and sexy look this season? -- Ben Purkert, author of THE MEN CAN'T BE SAVED
I have been agonising over saying something clever, funny and/or unusual enough to do Black Bag justice. I've failed dismally, which somehow seems in keeping with this brilliant novel. It's enough, perhaps, to note that it 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

Praise for The Transition:

Extremely smart and extremely funny, a brilliant dismantling of our corporatized century. A book like The Transition is not just a ray of light - it's utterly vital

* Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting *
Disquieting and witty but with such tenderness at its core that it's often heart-stopping. Gorgeous stuff. I devoured it * Lisa McInerney, author of The Glorious Heresies *
A tremendous novel - funny, shrewd, poignantly destabilising -- and charged with Luke Kennard's laconic wit and his gimlet eye for the foibles and nuances of human behaviour. A huge success * William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart *