Sadie Smith is a hired spy — ex-federal, now freelance, working for clients she never meets. Her job is to get inside a commune of radical farmers in southwest France and push them into doing something illegal enough to jail them. She has a fake name, a fake boyfriend she seduced to get the introduction, and total contempt for everybody she’s deceiving. Running underneath is the email she’s been reading without permission: long letters from Bruno Lacombe, the group’s old mentor, who has moved into a cave in the limestone and thinks the whole human project went wrong when we outcompeted the Neanderthals. Kushner lets his crackpot cosmology get more persuasive as Sadie’s certainty rots. She’s very funny and not remotely trustworthy.
Creation Lake