Creation Lake: A Novel By Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake is an electrifying novel that explores seduction, deception, and rebellion in a beautifully crafted, darkly humorous story. Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2024 by major outlets like Time, Vogue, The Guardian, and more, it has captured the attention of the literary world with its gripping narrative and complex characters.

At the center of the novel is “Sadie Smith,” a cunning and calculating thirty-four-year-old American woman sent to infiltrate an anarchist collective in France. Posing as a secret agent, Sadie manipulates those around her—including her lover, Lucien, a young Parisian aristocrat—using her sharp intelligence, strategic instincts, and disarming beauty. While she believes she’s in control, a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe begins to pull her into his web. Bruno, a mentor to the French subversives Sadie is surveilling, proposes a return to the ancient past as the solution to modern society’s ills, and his ideas begin to captivate and challenge Sadie.

In trademark Rachel Kushner style, Creation Lake delivers glittering insights through taut, succinct prose, crafting a page-turning thriller that is at once thrilling, cerebral, and highly entertaining. With layers of political intrigue, emotional tension, and darkly comic elements, the novel skillfully explores themes of power, manipulation, and the longing for escape from a modern world that feels increasingly detached from history.

Creation Lake solidifies Kushner as one of the most gifted novelists of her generation, and this noir-inspired work stands as her finest achievement yet. 📚❤️