Hi there, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Timbedirmias. I'll confess, I'm intrigued by things shrouded in mystery.

And that's quite literally how we find the narrator of Black Bag, the new novel by Luke Knard.

Hidden in a black bag, towards the back of the university lecture hall, where he's

tasked with observing the world around him.

Now, the forces that led him to that bag and the things he learns along the way are

themselves a mystery.

You'll hear Kinnard talk more about this with Weekend Edition host, Scott Simon.

The narrator of Luke Kinnard's new novel is never named.

He just declares, I'm an actor, a mostly unemployed and painfully poor.

To the university professor, Dr. Blend, offers him a role, the starring role, in fact, in an experiment.

Zip himself into a black leather bag and sit in the back of his class.

I am in black bag, and I'm lying on a desk at the back of the lecture theatre.

From the feel of it, I imagine it to be a desk with metal legs painted a glossy grey

and the surface to be a pine-colored fakewood

veneer. But why shouldn't I imagine the room to be far nicer than it may, in fact, be?

His new novel, Black Bag, and Luke Kinard joins us now from our studios in London.

Thanks so much for being with us.

Thanks so much for having me, Scott.

And I gather this is, at least in part inspired by an actual blackbag experiment in 1967.

That's right. A professor called Charles Gertzinger, who was using it to test the mere exposure

effect, the idea that we become fond of things

just by encountering them over and over again, even if we dislike them at first.

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