Novels

Hardcover. Sag Harbor NY, Permanent Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. SIGNED BY AUTHOR: "Best wishes, Larry Duberstein" on front fly leaf. Herman Melville, author of that famous first line, "Call me Ishmael," is best known for his masterpiece, Moby Dick. He wrote a few other works that have garnered literary attention, but after completing Moby Dick in 1851, he faded into obscurity (at least during his lifetime). Duberstein attempts to re-create Melville's life after he wrote his great novel. The book takes place mainly in 1882 while Melville is an inspector of customs in New York City. Dissatisfied with wife Elizabeth even though he appreciates her taking care of the house and the children, Melville has an affair with a woman named Cora (entirely fictional) whom he meets while on the job. Nonetheless, Duberstein's portrait of late-19th-century Manhattan is a wonder, rife with precise period detail and elegant prose. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Franklin Center PA, The Franklin Library, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover. Chatwin's third and perhaps best book. Features a special introduction by Chatwin not included in the trade edition. A fine copy in full leather binding that attempts to match the aboriginal motif in the book with all edges gilt and a silk book marker. Two color plates of Aboriginal bark painting following the title page, color decorated chapter headings. Publisher's promotional letter loosely inserted. SIGNED BY CHATWIN. One of the more attractive volumes in Franklin series. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Washington DC, Counterpoint, 1st, 2000, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 286 pages, hardcover with dust jacket. SIGNED BY NIXON on title page, also INSCRIBED on opposite page. Clean copy. Two people who can't live with each other or without each other. She wants to have children. He doesn't want to contribute to an already damaged-by-humans planet. This disagreement proceed a series of truly terrible events.

Hardcover. London, England, j.W. Arrowsmith, 1st Edition, 1898 , Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, 385 pages. Hardcover. B/w frontispiece, illustrations throughout by illustrator, Charles Dana Gibson. Tanning from age throughout, pages untrimmed, deckled. Letter from the author dated "17th Sept: 03" laid in (see image), possibly to William Heinemann. Green cover boards, gilt title on spine, front cover. Some agewear to spine top and bottom. Binding very good, spine straight. Very good condition.

Hardcover. NY, Dodd, Mead & Company, 1st, 1933, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, black cloth stamped in white, 84 pages. Decorative woodcut on endpapers. Internally bright and clean. Illustrated throughout with beautiful woodcut engravings by John Farleigh. Designed by Farleigh. No dust jacket. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W.W. Norton, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. First printing of this critically acclaimed novel set in 1943 (when pennies were made of zinc to conserve copper for the wqar effort) in Los Angeles. Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Ticknor & Fields , Uncorr. Proof, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, uncorrected proof of author's first book. Olive green wrappers, Clean, bright copy. After his wife dies, an old man joins forces with a fifteen-year-old runaway and eventually returns to his roots, there to find retribution, redemption, or love.

Hardcover. NY, Limited Editions CLub, 1960, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, bound in forest-green cloth, spine stamped in gilt with printed label attached. Introduction by Norman H. Strouse with color and b&w illustrations by Lynton Lamb. Copy #794 of 1500 SIGNED by the illustrator on the colophon page. Wells felt that this was his best novel. Very good in a bright yellow slipcase with some darkening to one area.

Softcover. NY, Grove Press, 1st pbk., 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover in pictorial wraps, 396 pages. Debut novel. This is the story of S.T. George, a young writer-in-residence at Cornell University, who is looking for love and dragons to slay. Momentous forces and a cast of extraordinary characters gather around him and soon George is caught up in an epic struggle. Magical storytelling certain to be reread, laughed over and remembered for a very long time. Clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. NY, Library of America, 1st, 2019, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 970 pages. Joan Didion's influence on postwar American letters is undeniable. Whether writing fiction, memoir, or trailblazing journalism, her gifts for narrative and dialogue, and her intimate but detached authorial persona, have won her legions of readers and admirers. Now Library of America launches its multi-volume edition of Didion's collected writings, prepared in consultation with the author, that brings together her fiction and nonfiction for the first time. Collected in this first volume are Didion's five iconic books from the 1960s and 1970s: Run River, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It As It Lays, A Book of Common Prayer, and The White Album. Whether writing about countercultural San Francisco, the Las Vegas wedding industry, Lucille Miller, Charles Manson, or the shopping mall, Didion achieves a wonderful negative sublimity without condemning her subjects or condescending to her readers. Chiefly about California, these books display Didion's genius for finding exactly the right language and tone to capture America's broken twilight landscape at a moment of headlong conflict and change. Remainder dot to bottom edge, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, D. Appleton-Century, 1st, 1947, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, light gray cloth with blue lettering, 309 pages. Historical novel set in New Bedford takes up the story of Russell Ashmead, the mildly rebellious middle son of a prosperous New Bedford family, when he is in his late teens, and follows him to the brink of old age. Over the course of the book he assists the escape of a fugitive from enslavement, sails as a foremast hand on a whaling ship, and is witness to fraud, riot, mutiny, and murder. He experiences romance at home and abroad, manages a textile mill, and becomes a shipowner. Bookplate on front fly leaf, otherwise a clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. London, Faber and Faber, 1st UK, 1999, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. An unlikely con man wagers wife, wealth, and sanity in pursuit of an elusive Old Master. Invited to dinner by the boorish local landowner, Martin Clay, an easily distracted philosopher, and his art-historian wife are asked to assess three dusty paintings blocking the draught from the chimney. But hiding beneath the soot is nothing less-Martin believes-than a lost work by Bruegel. So begins a hilarious trail of lies and deceits, desperate schemes and soaring hopes as Martin, betting all that he owns and much that he doesn't, embarks on a quest to prove his hunch, win his wife over, and separate the painting from its owner. The book was shortlisted for the 1999 Booker Prize . Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. London, Folio Society, 1st thus, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, original gilt-blocked decorated dark green cloth in slipcase. 172 pages, illustrated with wood engravings by Peter Reddick. Introduction by Angela Thirlwell. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1st UK, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. Canadian author's first book, a novel of late eighteenth-century London featuring young George Cautley navigating his way through London's high society, finds that nothing is as it seems and everyone wears a disguise. Illustrations by John Lawrence. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Little Brown, 1st, 1960, Hardcover, 336 pages, b&w drawings by Lea. Dust jacket with light edgewear, chipping. Novel about Hank Spurling, a Marine hero of the war in the Pacific, who returned to the Cloudrock Mountains in Wyoming. In the early days of World War II, Lea became a war correspondent for Life magazine, executing paintings of action in the North Atlantic, the South Pacific, China, North Africa, and Europe. Lea's career thereafter involved both painting and writing, on a variety of subjects but generally reflective of his roots in the Southwest. Clean copy.

Softcover. Los Angeles, Rare Bird Books, 1st US, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 122 pages. Advance Readers Copy. 'A great Russian novel in the grand Russian tradition' - LE FIGARO. Years after the death of their beloved son, there is a knock at the door of Nikolai and Vera's apartment. Introducing himself simply as 'Sergeant Bertrand', the unknown visitor triggers a precipitous journey into the depths of the human soul. Hailed as an early masterpiece of post-Soviet literature, Russian Gothic is now available in English for the first time. Three decades after it was written, its complex portrait of grief, misogyny, violence and love is as fresh, shocking and relevant as ever. Aleksandr Skorobogatov was born in Grodno in what is now Belorussia. He is one of the most original Russophone writers of the post-communist era. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Alfred A. Knopf, 1st, 2025, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. In this sweeping, timely thriller, a Palestinian American FBI agent teams up with a hardline Israeli cop to solve the murder of the Israeli police chief in Gaza. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Manchester UK, Carcanet Press , 1st UK, 1985, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover with a bright dust jacket, 300 pages. Set against the backdrop of Italy between 1939 to 1944 - the months of anxiety before the country entered the war through to the tension following the Allied victory - "All Our Yesterdays" follows the lives of two families during the period of great turbulence and tells how the children grow into war and its aftermath. The boys flirt with revolution; Amalia marries a young German Jew; Concettina marries into a family that supports Mussolini; and Anna the youngest child, becomes pregnant when she is sixteen and is married off to Cenzo Rena, an eccentric family friend. War scatters them, but even war cannot break their bonds. All Our Yesterdays is about the endurance and resilience of people living through adolescence and early adulthood in a hostile world. Ex-lib with minor residue to rear endpaper and dust jacket taped to covers.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, green cloth with dark blue lettering, decoration in a bright dust jacket with edgewear and chipping, 366 pages. Rear dj lists to Wild Horse Mesa. Name on front fly leaf in pencil, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. Cologne , Simon L'Africane, 1st, 1676, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, contemporary calf binding, rebacked with gilt lettering on leather spine. 91 pages, FRENCH TEXT. Cast of characters listed on last printed page (actually pg. 93) with 1 inch gone from bottom, not affecting text. A fictionalized account of Charles II's affair with Lady Castlemaine.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, 1st, 1996, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 306 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, W. W. Norton, 1st, 1971, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 213 pages. A coming of age story set in the early days of WW2. Jeffrey Stone just out of college, embarks on an bizarre adventure to discredit his father before he leaves for war.

Hardcover. NY, Random House, 1st, 2005, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. A harrowing odyssey of love and betrayal on the high seas-and in the shadowy corners of the human heart. At fifty-nine, Harold Snow has seen his share of death. His baptism of fire came on his twenty-first birthday, on a navy ship in the Coral Sea, when a Japanese kamikaze pilot slammed into the deck. Years later, in the aftermath of a typhoon in the Bay of Bengal, he lay awake on a ship surrounded by thousands of drowned corpses and listened to the sharks feed. Now, serving as boatswain aboard the Tarshish, a decrepit tanker whose papers are as suspect as its seaworthiness, a weary Snow feels death creeping closer than ever. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 2nd pr., 1964, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Fair, Hardcover in a worn, chipped dust jacket. Tyler's first novel. Ben Joe is the only boy in a family of six sisters, Mama and Gram. He is studying for a law degree in New York when he hears his eldest sister Joanne has left her husband and returned home with her baby girl. Out of a mixture of homesickness and duty Ben Joe returns to the home in which he has always felt like an outsider. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, St Martins Press, 1st, 1998, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 291 pages. It's a shame that Henry Roth died in 1995, because now readers will never know what happens to his fictional alter ego, Ira Stigman, once he leaves City College. For readers familiar with Roth's series of autobiographical novels, Requiem for Harlem is the last of four books chronicling the childhood and young adulthood of Stigman; for those who have not yet discovered Roth, consider reading the first three in the series to get a handle on the dark, complicated, and rich world Ira Stigman occupies. Set in 1920s Harlem, Roth's novels explore the life of Jewish immigrants. This last installment finds his alter ego about to leave childhood and Harlem forever behind as he begins an affair with Edith, a refined NYU English professor. Roth portrays his youthful self severely here, dwelling on the guilt and self-hatred resulting from an incestuous relationship with his sister and an affair with a young cousin. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Doubleday, Page & Co. , 1st, 1908, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, rust colored cloth binding decorated in silver and gilt. Color illustrated end papers. Four color plates by C. Cole Phillips. Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton (October 30, 1857 - June 14, 1948) was an American author. Many of her novels are set in her home state of California. Her bestseller Black Oxen (1923) was made into a silent movie of the same name. In addition to novels, she wrote short stories, essays, and articles for magazines and newspapers on such issues as feminism, politics, and war. Light smudge to blank prelim page, otherwise clean.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1987, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 161 pages. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. Light shelf-wear to dust jacket, else a clean, tight copy.

Hardcover. Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill Company, Reprint, 1907, Book: Good, Dust Jacket: None, Hardcover, 323 pages. With Illustrations by William Rainey, R. I. Minor spine edge and corner wear. Previous owner's inscription on front fly leaf. Decorated front cover. Clean pages and tight binding.

Hardcover. New York, Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1st American Edition, 1951, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, 253 pages. Hardcover. Blue cover boards, pink title on spine, boards in excellent condition. Dust jacket unclipped, has some age wear, wrapped in clear, plastic mylar for protection. Pages have some very light tanning, unmarked. "Sansom has coupled his storyteller's art with his incomparable and lucent style."

Hardcover. London, Macmillan, 1st, 1985, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. 295 pages. West's unfinished novel, the subsequent chapters following This Real Night. A feminist novel that reveals both the problems of marriage and the ecstasies of sexual love, completing the final chapters of the saga that began with THE FOUNTAIN OVERFLOWS, and continued with THIS REAL NIGHT. Afterword by Victoria Glendinning. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harper & Row, 1st, 1979, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket, 185 pages. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a br5ight, unclipped dust jacket. First edition of author's first book. Pulitzer Prize finalist. Well conceived and well written, this book examines the tragedy of a man whose life epitomizes failure on every level. A victim of circumstances, Peter Jernigan is now emotionally crippled and psychologically impoverished. His already distorted personal relationships, skewed further by a dependency on alcohol, sweep him forward, with horrifying swiftness, into a nightmarish cycle of failure, loss, and spiritual death. Bright but unsuccessful, Jernigan drifts through a bleak life that only becomes worse. He has lost his father and wife in successive accidents and now must deal with the adolescent traumas of his only son. His encounter with the divorced mother of his son's girlfriend promises to lighten his life but instead complicates it even further. Clean copy.

Hardcover. London, Picador, 1st, 2001, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright dust jacket. This signed first edition of author and journalist Sid Smith's novel 'Something Like A House' was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Whitbread First Novel Award, following a British soldier who deserts to China during the Korean War and stays there some 35 years, bringing up a little girl who later becomes a victim of experimental biological warfare. Despite being set in China, Smith had never traveled there before writing the novel, the background gleaned from extensive research at the British Library amongst other places. An exciting novel set in a China almost unknown to the outside world, a chilling account of an army deserter living through a Cultural Revolution. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, W W Norton & Co, 1st, 2023, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Enright is author of seven novels, most recently Actress. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lifetime A.hievement Award . An incandescent novel from one of our greatest living novelists (The Times) about the inheritance of trauma, wonder, and love across three generations of women. Nell McDaragh never knew her grandfather, the celebrated Irish poet Phil McDaragh. But his love poems seem to speak directly to her. Restless and wryly self-assured, at twenty-two Nell leaves her mother Carmel's orderly home to find her own voice as a writer (mostly online, ghost-blogging for an influencer) and to live a poetical life. As she chases obsessive love, damage, and transcendence, in Dublin and beyond, her grandfather's poetry seems to guide her home. The Wren, the Wren brings to life three generations of McDaragh women who must contend with inheritances-of poetic wonder and of abandonment by a man who is lauded in public and carelessly selfish at home. Clean copy.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin, 1st, 1990, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in an unclipped dust jacket with light fading to spine. Collection of stories about a platoon of soldiers in the Vietnam War. First trade edition with 1 in number row. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, E. P. Dutton, 1st, 1981, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED BY IRVING at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference in red ink on the half-title page. A whimsical family saga of a hotel and a bear and an opera house. Irving's fifth published novel and the basis for a 1984 film adaptation by director Tony Richardson. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Ecco, 1st, 2022, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. For almost a decade, Claudia has counseled patients at Mercy Street, a clinic in the heart of the city. The work is consuming, the unending dramas of women in crisis. For its patients, Mercy Street offers more than health care; for many, it is a second chance.But outside the clinic, the reality is different. Anonymous threats are frequent. A small, determined group of anti-abortion demonstrators appears each morning at its door. As the protests intensify, fear creeps into Claudia's days, a humming anxiety she manages with frequent visits to Timmy, an affable pot dealer in the midst of his own existential crisis. At Timmy's, she encounters a random assortment of customers, including Anthony, a lost soul who spends most of his life online, chatting with the mysterious Excelsior11--the screenname of Victor Prine, an anti-abortion crusader who has set his sights on Mercy Street and is ready to risk it all for his beliefs. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. San Diego, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 337 pages. unclipped dust jacket protected by mylar cover, with minor rubbing. Remainder mark to top edge. Otherwise, clean and tight copy. The memorable Arkansas town from the perspective of its smallest denizens.

Hardcover. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2nd pr., 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover, 280 pages, INSCRIBED BY AUTHOR on title page. Very clean and tight copy. Dust jacket price-clipped.

Softcover. NY, Penguin Classic, reprint, 2016, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 412 pages. Full of pungency and wit, this luminous work is Bulgakov's crowning achievement, skilfully blending magical and realistic elements, grotesque situations and major ethical concerns. Written during the darkest period of Stalin's repressive reign and a devastating satire of Soviet life, it combines two distinct yet interwoven parts, one set in contemporary Moscow, the other in ancient Jerusalem, each brimming with incident and with historical, imaginary, frightful and wonderful characters. Clean, bright copy.

Hardcover. NY, William Morrow, 1st, 2004, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED/SIGNED BY AUTHOR on the title page. Many men aim high; Tom Farrell dares to be average. While his friends accumulate wedding rings, mortgages, and even, alarmingly, babies, Tom still lives alone in his rented apartment with nothing but condiments and alcohol in his refrigerator. He spends Saturday mornings watching cartoons and eating Cocoa Puffs out of an Empire Strikes Back bowl, and devotes the rest of the weekend to his other favorite hobbies: sports and girls. His credo, to think and act like a thirteen-year-old boy at all times, has worked well enough to land him a decent job writing headlines for the New York Tabloid. But neither his personal life nor his professional life has any forward momentum; he's occupied the same cubicle since the first George Bush was president and is currently "between girlfriends." At thirty-two, it starts to occur to him: There's a fine line between picky and loser. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, George Braziller, 2nd pr., 1991, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket, 161 pages. The author's first book to be translated into English. Translated from the Turkish by Victoria Holbrook. Pamuk would go on to win the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature. Clean copy.

Softcover. Evanston IL, Northwestern University Press, reprints, 1995, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Two softcover books, like new condition. The first volume INSCRIBED BY VOINOVICH on the half-title page and dated September 27, 1996. Clean copies. Published in NUP's European Classics series.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, orange cloth with black lettering on the spine and front cover, in a bright dust jacket with edgewear and chipping, 365 pages. Rear dj lists to Betty Zane. No markings.

Hardcover. NY, Grosset & Dunlap, reprint, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Good, Hardcover, blue cloth with dark blue lettering on spine and front cover, dust jacket with edgewear and chipping, 338 pages. Rear dj lists to Wild Horse Mesa. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Viking, 1st, 2003, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. INSCRIBED AND SIGNED BY FFORDE on the title page "Jasper" with his blue Goliath Publishing stamp at the bottom of the page. The third novel in the New York Times bestselling Thursday Next series is "great fun-especially for those with a literary turn of mind and a taste for offbeat comedy" (The Washington Post Book World). Clean copy.

Softcover. NY, Pantheon, 1st, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, peach-color wraps. Uncorrected bound galleys. Historical novel about the competing claims of faith, love, and politics during the McCarthy era. Washington, D.C., early 1950s: a world of bare-knuckled ideology, hard drinking, and secret dossiers, dominated by such outsized characters as Richard Nixon, Drew Pearson, Perle Mesta, and Joe McCarthy. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Knopf, 1st, 2013, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Two brothers bound by tragedy. A fiercely brilliant woman haunted by her past. A country torn by revolution. A love that lasts long past death. An extraordinary new novel, set in both India and America, that expands the scope and range of one of our most dazzling storytellers. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1st, 1992, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. Translated from the Hungarian by Imre Goldstein. 394 pages. The rich, poetic story of a man, a family, and a country. David Kobra's enchanted childhood in a small town in the heart of Central Europe comes to an abrupt end. As the Jews of the town are being put on trains to concentration camps, young Kobra escapes to Budapest. He survives the war years in a 'protected house,' grows up with death and violence, witnesses Soviet liberation, lives under Soviet oppression. David Kobra is a writer; he remembers, and he creates. Sharp images of the past alternate with the confused present. Clean copy.

Hardcover. NY, Scribner, 1st, 2024, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. 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. *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*. Clean copy.