The Black Bag

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026

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.