



Creation Lake
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
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- $189.00
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- $189.00
Descripción editorial
**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 Carré' 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*
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An undercover agent embeds with radical French environmentalists in this scintillating story of activism and espionage from Kushner (The Mars Room). Sadie Smith, a former FBI agent who lost her job after she was accused of entrapment, takes an assignment from unidentified contacts in the private sector. Her mission is to infiltrate the subversive commune Le Moulin, which is led by activist Pascal Balmy and is suspected of having destroyed a set of excavators at a reservoir construction site. Le Moulin's ideas derive from their elderly mentor, Bruno Lacombe, who has spent the past 12 years living in caves. Bruno emerges from time to time to communicate with the group by email, but none of the characters see him in person. In Paris, Sadie seduces a filmmaker friend of Pascal's to secure an introduction to him. Kushner intersperses Sadie's tale with Bruno's colorful claims, such as the alleged superiority of the Neanderthals (their square jaw was a "sunk cost") and the existence of mythological creatures like Bigfoot ("We are not alone"). Eventually, Sadie learns of the group's plans to protest a local fair, and she approaches the conclusion of her assignment with alarming amorality. Most of the narrative is dedicated to the activists' philosophizing and Sadie's gimlet-eyed observations, which Kushner magically weaves together ("People tell themselves, strenuously, that they believe in this or that political position," Sadie muses. "But the deeper motivation for their rhetoric... is to shore up their own identity"). Readers will be captivated.