Black Bag by Luke Kennard is a novel with an endearingly odd premise: an unnamed male actor signs up for a psychological experiment in which he wears a large leather black bag in public and must not speak or interact with anyone. It is based on a real study in 1967 at Oregon State University which recorded the students’ reactions, but nothing about the person inside the bag. The satire targets everything from academia to AI, and the humour is deployed well in the first half but somewhat runs out of steam in the second half. Black Bag is in contention for this year’s Booker Prize, although I think the surreal tone could make this one of the more divisive choices on the shortlist. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Wigtown
Books I Read in September 2026 (and a visit to Wigtown)
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Confessions of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
If you enjoyed The Diary of a Bookseller, then the second volume of Shaun Bythell’s account of running a large second-hand bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland will definitely appeal. It is very much more of the same in terms of content, format and sense of humour with bizarre customer queries and the trials and tribulations of book dealing providing the main focus of his diary entries from 2015. Continue reading
Filed under Books
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell
‘The Diary of a Bookseller’ is Shaun Bythell’s account of running Scotland’s largest second-hand bookshop which he bought in 2001 in Wigtown, Scotland’s national book town. While many book lovers may dream about spending all day every day working in a rambling Georgian townhouse stuffed with over 100,000 books, Bythell’s diaries from 2014 to early 2015 dispel a lot of the romanticised myths about running a bookshop, particularly when it comes to the realities of competing against a certain online retailer. Continue reading
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