The Five Books to Put on Your Reading List This Fall

Welcome to the Fall Culture Preview, where we’re highlighting the best in entertainment as part of the September issue of Bloomberg Businessweek. We’ve already laid out the five museum exhibitions we’re most excited to see, the seven new TV shows to watch, and the eight movies that will have people talking. Next up: The books to add to your reading list.

Creation Lake
by Rachel Kushner
Kushner made a name for herself as one of the most interesting and adept voices in contemporary fiction with her three previous novels: Telex From Cuba (set immediately pre-Castro), The Mars Room (set inside a prison) and The Flamethrowers (set partly in 1970s New York). Here she continues to extend her range with a thriller that takes place in rural France, where her narrator, a beautiful, deeply cynical American undercover operative who goes by the name Sadie, is embedded in a group of suspected eco-activists. Sadie is there at the behest of shadowy interests to spy and gather evidence of misdeeds, but gradually she becomes transfixed by the group’s enigmatic quasi-founder, who communicates only through long, discursive emails. Kushner’s writing is clean, tight and often very funny as she jumps between past and present but never loosens her iron grip on the reader’s attention. Sept. 3, Scribner