Creation Lake

(Hardback, Large Print Edition)

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Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty who is sent to do dirty work in France. Sadie Smith is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by cold bumpmaking him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone she targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her contactsshadowy figures in business and governmentinstruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

In this region of old farms and prehistoric caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who believes that the path to emancipation is not revolt but a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie is certain shes the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

Reviews

One of the finest novelists working in the English language. Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

Like Bruno-the-philosopher, Kushner is a dazzling chronicler of end times. Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

Kushner inhabits the spys perspective with such eerie finesse that you feel how much fun shes having the real covert operative here is Kushner, whos never felt more cunning than in this novel vital and profound. Ron Charles, The Washington Post

A dazzling work of fiction: brisk, stylish, funny, moving, and unexpectedly, piercingly moral At once terse and vivid, economical and expansive true, funny, sad, shrewd, and beautifully controlled through each unyielding sentence. Anahid Neressian, The New York Review of Books

"The two-time National Book Award finalist has once again outdone herself... a flat-out page turner of a spy story, dotted with sex and booze, sarcasm and cynicism, and a heady dose of vital curiosity." Michelle Kircher, San Francisco Chronicle

What makes Kushners work irresistible is her brainy swagger. Leigh Haber, Boston Globe

A profound and irresistible page-turner The prose is thrilling, the ideas electrifying. The 2024 Booker Prize judges

Author Bio

Rachel Kushner is the author of the New York Times bestseller Creation Lake, her latest novel; The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection; and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba,as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Mdicis and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Creation Lake was also longlisted for the National Book Award. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.