Creation Lake

From Rachel Kushner comes a new novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France

SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2024

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

‘Imagine Slow Horses’ Jackson Lamb in the body of Jodie Comer’s character in Killing Eve’ SUNDAY TIMES

‘Compulsively readable… Kill Bill written by John le Carre’ OBSERVER

Seductive and cunning American spy-for-hire Sadie Smith has been sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France.

Her mission- to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of an enigmatic elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation, lives in a Neanderthal cave, and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism.

Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and finds Bruno’s idealism laughable, but just as she is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

Beneath this a taut, dazzling story of espionage and intrigue lies one of a woman caught in the crossfire between the past and the future, and a profound treatise on human history.

‘The most exciting writer of her generation’ BRET EASTON ELLIS

‘Reinvents the spy novel in one cool, erudite gesture’ HERNAN DIAZ
A BOOK OF THE YEAR FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES, NEW YORK TIMES, INDEPENDENT, DAILY TELEGRAPH, THE ATLANTIC, GUARDIAN, VULTURE, THE ECONOMIST

Author Biography

Rachel Kushner is the author of 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 Medicis and been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. 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 are translated into twenty-seven languages.