Booker Prize 2026: A diverse shortlist to inspire all sorts of readers

Black Bag, Luke Kennard

Luke Kennard’s Black Bag is a campus-based comedy about an actor who goes too deep into a role he’s playing in a psychological experiment.

Black Bag was inspired by a 1967 experiment at Oregon State University in which an individual cloaked in black sat mutely in a seminar for a semester. Where the study focused on the reactions of the witnesses, Black Bag is the story and meditations of the man who becomes increasingly attached to his role and, amusingly, his bag.

Kennard’s protagonist is a flat-broke actor relying on cash-in-hand corporate murder mysteries and the kindness of his friend Claudio in an otherwise dismal world. Wearing the bag outside of the classroom not only removes the problem of how to be but even attracts the attention of a female professor who wants “to fuck nothing” – he is both strikingly visible and anonymous. The novel is laugh-out-loud funny but melancholy and provocative too. Some of Bag’s strongest relationships are those he imagines, like ongoing conversations with his parents’ dog and narrated village life with a fictional Swedish wife.

By Tory Young, associate professor in English literature

The End of Everything, M John Harrison

The End of Everything is science fiction that imagines alien-induced social collapse on the Kent coast.

The backdrop of The End...

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