Genevieve Gaunt

Undercover in the Dordogne: Creation Lake, by Rachel Kushner, reviewed

An American spy-for-hire uses her feminine wiles to infiltrate an eco-warrior group in rural France. But will she go off-piste and become indoctrinated?

Cave paintings at Lascaux in the Dordogne, the setting of Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. [Alamy] 
issue 14 September 2024

Creation Lake, by the American author Rachel Kushner, is a dazzling, genre-defying novel, satirical yet profound. In her 2018 novel The Mars Room, Kushner took us inside the US prison system and eviscerated it. Here she goes back a decade, as well as 40,000 years, interweaving into the main plot notes on the extinction of the Neanderthals.

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