About this Event
Each month the group will focus on a contemporary novel, swap thoughts, uncover themes, and chat about the characters who stayed with us long after the final page. Expect conversation, new discoveries, good drinks and a room full of people who believe books are best enjoyed together. Blue group will meet once a month.
The book for this months meet is the Booker Prize 2026 shortlisted, BLACK BAG by Luke Kennard. We have copies in store.
ABOUT BLACK BAG
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.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026
‘The funniest and smartest novel I’ve read in a while’ ZADIE SMITH
‘Black Bag made me laugh aloud dozens and dozens of times . . . I loved its inventive originality and its ambition: it is very powerfully worth your time’ KATHERINE RUNDELL
‘It is excellent, both funny and genuinely clever . . . go on, treat yourself’ MARK HADDON
‘Ya gotta read Black Bag‘ FERN BRADY
‘A campus novel for our end times . . . Black Bag fizzes with wit and invention’ 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’ Sunday Times
‘Hilarious and poignant . . . Luke’s prose ripples with unusual images and wry aphorisms. An ode to the importance of friendship, tenderness and love’ TLS
‘With all the fuss about the manosphere, Black Bag comes as comic relief . . . profound as well as funny’ Standard
‘Had me laughing from page one’ New Statesman
‘Very, very funny’ GQ
‘Winningly wry, both vulnerable and dyspeptic’ Mail on Sunday
Event venue & nearby stays
The Book and Bottle, 8 Old Cross, Hertford, United Kingdom
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