BOOK OF THE WEEK

Review

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner review – double dealing in deepest France

Longlisted for this year’s Booker prize, Kushner’s cleverly paced tale of espionage, narrated by a ‘wild and boastful’ agent provocateur, juggles a killer plot with anarchy, agriculture and prehistory, making for her most entertaining novel yet

Anthony Cummins

25 August 2024

Radical politics, mixed-up heroines and the threat of violence are staple ingredients in the fiction of Rachel Kushner, who began to be spoken of as one of the century’s great American novelists with her second book, The Flamethrowers (2013), about a biker in the art world of 70s New York and Italy during the “years of lead”. But even though her third novel, The Mars Room, set among women serving life in a California prison, was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2018, I’m not convinced she’s truly on the radar of most readers this side of the Atlantic, where we’re warier of the vast, chiselled, ideas-packed tales ambitious American writers are less likely to shy away from.