Rachel Kushner’s fourth novel Creation Lake is a spy novel stacked with ideas. As our fast-thinking, gun-packing protagonist wends her way down to the south of France, charged—by forces unknown—with infiltrating and sowing chaos at a commune of eco-warriors, her mission leads her into exhilarating reflections on activism, on charisma, on neanderthals and other lost races of archaic humans, on the remodelling—some might say devastation—of rural France in the name of progress, on loss in its myriad forms, on the shadows loss leaves behind, on Guy Debord, on the apparently charmed life of Louis Ferdinand Céline, on Daft Punk’s ubiquitous Get Lucky, on space, on time, on spacetime, and on the many paths she has and hasn’t taken in her life… As that list hopefully demonstrates, the scope of Creation Lake is vast, stretching from the micro of the personal to the macro of the cosmos—and touching on everything in between. And yet incredibly, Creation Lake never feels weighed down by all this. Quite the opposite. It hurls forward at exactly the dizzying speed you’d expect from the wise-cracking secret agent at its heart. All in all, Creation Lake is quite the ride. Recorded in Paris in March 2024.