Black Bag

Growing up in a family shaped by the death of her brother, she discovered an extraordinary talent for the piano and won a scholarship to study music.

And this novel moves between her younger years and her later life as an unexpected connection with someone from her past prompts her to look again at the people, choices and circumstances that shaped her.

so on it's On its surface, it's a book about music, which I guess is one of the reasons why it interested Rhiannon, but it's also about ambition, love, family, class, grief, and the gap between the life that you imagine as a young person and the one that we actually end up living.

So it's, as with most Barbara Kingsolver books, it's a lot more than it seems like it's gonna be on the surface.

Yeah.

Which sounds awful that she had to go through that horrible experience for me to go, oh, okay, now I care.

Yeah, I think the other thing that bothered me was... her sort of the the relationship the that she enters into in in the the first portion of of the novel um i don't know like she seemed like a different person in that as well like there was there was like three versions of her for me and i didn't really know how they all tied together and i think that's that's why i i struggled with this book um like i've read it nice and quickly it was absolutely fine easy to read but i i struggled with yeah her and getting invested in a character that seemed to just not quite add up to one person

Yeah, and the only thing that I can think, because I have such respect for Barbara Kingsolver, I have to think that that's purposeful and that it is that she, as a person, was not sure who she was from a very young age and had... expectations and big boots to fill with regards to her brother and then obviously this musical talent that she's got.

Anyway, all of this to say, let's remind our listeners of the books that are on the shortlist.

So we have The End of Everything by M. John Harrison, The Disappearers by Marlon James, Black Bag by Luke Kennard, May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry, The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout, and John of John by Douglas Stewart.

Thank you for

that.

Oh my

God.

Anyway, on to our third book and one of the shortest titles on the list, Black Bag by Luke Kennard.

Is it Kennard?

I think people who like fallow who like real animal will like this book.

Um, and you know, I'm adding to the praise because it has, it's on the Booker list, um, black bag by Luke Kennard.

If you haven't read this book or come across it yet, it's about a guy, an out of work actor who loves acting and loves the weirder projects comes across this, uh, strange acting job on a website called like strangeactingjobs.com uh comes across this job where he um is asked to wear a black bag that covers his entire body and sit in the back of this professor's class what he isn't expecting is that he kind of likes being in the black bag and starts to wear it more And it just sort of, it's a farce.

It's a campus novel.

It's really, really dark.

Okay.

Black Bag by Luke Kennard, which is up for the Booker Prize.

I didn't know anything about this until I-

Mm

Great.

So I sat up and paid attention to that, and then I h- read the pitch for it, which is out of work actor is like trolling the job boards, and he sees that there's a professor who wants a performance artist, and he goes and meets the professor.

And the job is to wear a black bag, it's like a black leather bag that he zips himself up into every day, like it covers his head.

Just his little legs stick out, and eventually he gets a pair of flip-flops.

i love a bookie book i love a murder bookie who done it castle seven characters one of them did it like it's just written for me

i know a bookish book i'm totally oh my gosh um yeah you're gonna tell me how that is because i am i made the mistake of putting every book long listed for the booker on my library holds and they all came in at the same time and then they just released the short list and I was like oh man I don't know if I could but my original thinking I was never going to read all 14 of these giant literary novels but my original thinking was like I'm going to read the first like 30 pages of them all and see which ones hang out just to like you know consider so yeah so i i have a lot of library books i did start reading um black bag um which is it's a very quirky premise um and i really love the opening i was like oh wow and there is something too like also i think and i don't know what it is but reading something on the computer versus reading something in text just hits different like i don't know if you feel that

way yeah

yeah but and also audio too i i count everything as reading it's just like there's something about holding a book in your hand that i just can't really um shake off and books out but print sales are up like i think everybody's sort of on That was kind of like something that was very...

to the books.

We're all looking for a vacation.

Anyway, I enjoyed Black Bag, the opening of this one, and I might actually keep reading that one.

And then there was another one that...

I know you're very incred- incredibly busy writing, but, um, have you found some time to be reading, Catherine, and is there anything you want to shout about?

I have loved recently Black Bag by Luke Kennard-

Mm

... which is currently on the long list for the Booker, and almost all the books I love most are big swings.

I, I love a book that aims very high, like, uh, A Place of Greater Safety or The Count of Monte Cristo or Emma, all of them a big swing.

No matter what the, the sort of, uh, physical space, a big emotional swing.

Black Bag is a massive swing.

It is the story, based on a real story, of a young man who is an out-of-work actor who is employed by a professor of psychology to wear a black suit bag in the back of all of his lectures, uh, to test the presupposition that something that you are consistently exposed to will eventually become familiar and thereby precious to you.