Black Bag
By Luke Kennard
John Murray, £16.99
In Black Bag, a middle-aged actor who’s used to scraping by with dinner theatre gigs takes on a new role – as the black bag in a psychology lecture hall. He silently sits in the back row, in the body bag, as a part of a semester-long social experiment. The performance consumes him as he spends increasing amounts of his personal time in the bag. The novel proves to be an offbeat meditation on masculinity with delightful surprises including astute commentary from the family dog and a quietly heart-warming thread with his childhood friend, Claudio. This is muddled, however, by an unwieldy plot. Luke Kennard delivers a unique angle on the novel that would benefit from a trimming to accentuate the slicing absurdity that makes Black Bag worth reading. Lanie Brice
Afloat: Small Boats, Swell and Seaspray
By David Gange
HarperCollins, £22
This journey through the small-boat traditions of the Atlantic shore is an intimately observed study of life at sea, in all its adaptation. Gange is brilliant on the innovations coastal communities make to navigate headlands, tides and rocks, each vessel an instrument in the endless play of wood and rope, hide and tar. He gathers these places in a windblown fugue that begins in Connemara, and carries through Lewis, the water lands of the Sámi, Faroe, Greenland, Newfoundland and Maine, to beach on far Barbados. Along the way, Gange takes to the water with a keen ear for the sea’s speech. His journeys are also studies of birds, seals, whales and the people who live with them in cultures that are as rich as the environments they inhabit. The result is an immersive, thoughtful book, Afloat an engaging account of the offshore stories that shape our island and its ocean neighbours. Nicholas Allen
You Want What We’ve Got: Big Tech v Big Journalism
By Jason Whittaker
Reaktion Books, £16.99
Who will gatekeep the gatekeepers? That is the principal question posed by this 320-page overview of how Silicon Valley IT companies have over the past 30 years eroded and often eclipsed the historical power and influence of newspapers and news broadcasters. China, Russia, Iran and other large countries have always rigorously controlled their media, but in much of the rest of the world social media is replacing legacy media and humans are no longer determining what appears in people’s news feeds. Algorithms maximise engagement, disregard fact-checking and allow fake news, misinformation and AI “slop” to proliferate, undermining democracy, warns Whittaker, a communications professor at the University of Lincoln in England. Ray Burke
