
Creation Lake
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Rachel Kushner
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By:
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Rachel Kushner
About this listen
*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 BOOKER PRIZE*
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD*
*LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 PEN FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION*
*AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER*
*NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2024 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE ATLANTIC, VULTURE, VOGUE, THE WASHINGTON POST, KIRKUS REVIEWS, NPR, THE ECONOMIST, THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY, VOX, and more*
From Rachel Kushner, two-time finalist for both the Booker Prize and National Book Award, a “vital” (The Washington Post) and “wickedly entertaining” (The Guardian) novel about a seductive and cunning American woman who infiltrates an anarchist collective in France—a propulsive page-turner filled with dark humor.
Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics and clean beauty who is sent to do dirty work in France. “Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to her lover, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian she has met by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone she targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.
In this region of old farms and prehistoric caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who believes that the path to emancipation is not revolt but a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.
Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner’s rendition of “noir” is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner’s finest achievement yet—a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.©2024 Rachel Kushner (P)2024 Simon & Schuster Audio
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Story
1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures
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Would give six stars if possible
- By love it on 08-31-24
By: Anne Michaels
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Shella
- By: Andrew Vachss
- Narrated by: Phil Gigante
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of the acclaimed Burke private-eye series comes an ambitious and chilling novel that shows us not only what evil is, but where it comes from. For Shella is nothing less than a tour of evil’s spawning ground, conducted by one of its natural predators.He is called “Ghost” because he is so nondescript as to be invisible and because he slays with such reflexive ease that he might be one of the dead.
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Vachss best character
- By Shawn on 04-25-12
By: Andrew Vachss
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The Safekeep
- By: Yael van der Wouden
- Narrated by: Stina Nielsen, Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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An exhilarating, twisted tale of desire, suspicion, and obsession between two women staying in the same house in the Dutch countryside during the summer of 1961—a powerful exploration of the legacy of WWII and the darker parts of our collective past.
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This One Should Win
- By K. Bella Bestia on 10-13-24
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Martyr!
- A Novel
- By: Kaveh Akbar
- Narrated by: Arian Moayed
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Cyrus Shams is a young man grappling with an inheritance of violence and loss: his mother’s plane was shot down over the skies of the Persian Gulf in a senseless accident; and his father’s life in America was circumscribed by his work killing chickens at a factory farm in the Midwest.
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One of the best novels I have ever read/heard.
- By James on 04-06-24
By: Kaveh Akbar
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Colored Television
- A Novel
- By: Danzy Senna
- Narrated by: Kristen Ariza
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Jane has high hopes her life is about to turn around. After years of living precariously, she, her painter husband, Lenny, and their two kids have landed a stint as house sitters in a friend’s luxurious home high in the hills above Los Angeles, a gig that coincides magically with Jane’s sabbatical. If she can just finish her latest novel, Nusu Nusu, the centuries-spanning epic Lenny refers to as her “mulatto War and Peace,” she’ll have tenure and some semblance of stability and success within her grasp. But things don’t work out quite as hoped.
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Frustrating
- By Carolyn White on 12-12-24
By: Danzy Senna
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Orbital
- By: Samantha Harvey
- Narrated by: Sarah Naudi
- Length: 5 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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A slender novel of epic power and the winner of the Booker Prize 2024, Orbital deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men traveling through space. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at a speed of over seventeen thousand miles an hour as the earth reels below.
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Dull
- By ELLEZEE on 02-03-24
By: Samantha Harvey
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Intermezzo
- A Novel
- By: Sally Rooney
- Narrated by: Éanna Hardwicke
- Length: 16 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties—successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women—his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke. Ivan is a twenty-two-year-old competitive chess player. He has always seen himself as socially awkward, a loner, the antithesis of his glib elder brother. Now, in the early weeks of his bereavement, Ivan meets Margaret.
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I felt a lot of empathy towards the excellently developed characters.
- By Hanoverian girl on 09-29-24
By: Sally Rooney
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Gringos
- By: Charles Portis
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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For a time, Jimmy spent his expat days in Mexico unearthing pre-Columbian artifacts. Now he makes a living doing small trucking jobs and helping out with the occasional missing-person situation. But Jimmy’s laid-back lifestyle is being seriously imposed upon by a ninety-pound stalker named Louise. Add to this a sudden wave of hippies led by a murderous ex-con guru in search of psychic happenings, archaeologists unearthing (illegally) the Mayan tombs, and Louise and her weirdo husband’s quest for UFO sites, and Jimmy’s south-of-the-border existence is in danger.
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A modern Mark Twain
- By Patrick King on 06-29-23
By: Charles Portis
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The Empusium
- A Health Resort Horror Story
- By: Olga Tokarczuk
- Narrated by: Antonia Lloyd-Jones, Natasha Soudek
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great issues of the day: Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women born inferior? War or peace? Meanwhile, disturbing things are happening in the guesthouse and the surrounding hills. Someone—or something—seems to be watching, attempting to infiltrate this cloistered world.
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Never ending Misogyny
- By Nina O on 10-11-24
By: Olga Tokarczuk
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The Hypocrite
- A Novel
- By: Jo Hamya
- Narrated by: Claire Kinson
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might have hoped, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. Sophia’s play has been met with rave reviews, but her father has studiously avoided reading any of them.
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Consistently boring
- By lifelong learner on 10-09-24
By: Jo Hamya
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This Strange Eventful History
- By: Claire Messud
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Over seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, the pieds-noirs Cassars live in an itinerant state—separated in the chaos of World War II, running from a complicated colonial homeland, and, after Algerian independence, without a homeland at all. This Strange Eventful History, told with historical sweep, is above all a family story: of patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them and stifles their children; of François and Denise, devoted siblings connected by their family's strangeness; of François's union with Barbara; of Chloe, the result of that union.
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Be Prepared for a Jarring Narration
- By Thomp/Suis on 05-17-24
By: Claire Messud
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Playground
- A Novel
- By: Richard Powers
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini, Robin Siegerman, Eunice Wong, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.
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What a tremendous story
- By Deb Hatch on 11-08-24
By: Richard Powers
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Wild Houses
- By: Colin Barrett
- Narrated by: Damian Gildea
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The riotous, raucous, and deeply resonant debut novel from “one of the best story writers in the English language today” (Financial Times), Wild Houses follows two outsiders caught in the crosshairs of a small-town revenge kidnapping gone awry.
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Insider look at a small crime
- By Probably did on 03-24-24
By: Colin Barrett
What listeners say about Creation Lake
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Raj A.
- 09-11-24
Author should not have been the reader
This would have been so much better with a professional reader. The author is so out of sync with the character and left it hard to engage with the story. Felt like an obligation to listen.
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13 people found this helpful
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- Rod
- 10-07-24
Lots of interesting ideas
Sadly, the author butchers the reading of her own work with a monotonous cadence and poor pronunciation of French words and names.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Colleen
- 10-02-24
I couldn’t bother to finish it.
It just droned on about nothing. I tried to stay with it, but gave up.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Saikungbob
- 11-12-24
Next time, please hire a professional narrator
The book is too wordy, but the worst problem is the reader. I don’t know what the author was thinking! She is not a good narrator. I’ve read that her other novels are better, but when I saw that she narrated them, too, I crossed them off my wish list.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Lisa L.
- 12-12-24
Lack of a story
There is actual story within the book. It is only the author’s ramblings on her perception of the world
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2 people found this helpful
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- Margaret
- 12-11-24
The Author Should Not Have Narrated
This book has gotten all kinds of praise and I think I understand why, but the author should NOT have been the reader. I have struggled to come up with a way to describe her narration. She uses a narrow range of tones, not monotone, but almost sing-song. I found it annoying and almost painful to listen to. I would recommend reading this book, not listening to this audio version.
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1 person found this helpful
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- sophie simpson
- 02-03-25
Please, Authors, don’t narrate your own book.
Unless you are an actor writing a book, please for the love of God, don’t narrate your own work. The lack of intonation is so irritating, i found myself annoyed listening to this book that i am sure I would’ve loved if I had read it
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- Sogol
- 01-30-25
Should not have been read by the author
I'm not sure why the author chose to read this novel. Not a great performance.
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- Rob B.
- 10-26-24
Not What I expected.
Apparently Rachel Kushner is a big name in the literature world so it got lots of press. When this book came out it was touted as part espionage and suspense. There is little of either with lots of meandering conversations about neanderthal man, etc etc. Great book if you like that sort of thing. Not my cup of tea.
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3 people found this helpful
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- evan
- 10-01-24
A podium for philosophies
This was not a thriller, as advertised, but the simple story arch that served as a vector for the author to explore quasi anthropological musings. Not a lot of depth of character. Not event a ton of plot.
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1 person found this helpful