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Booker Prize Shortlist 2024; National Book Award for Fiction Longlist 2024. Sadie Smith (at least that’s her name for this op) is a hard-drinking, good-looking, 34-year-old American woman. She works as an undercover agent, first for the FBI, and more recently, for anonymous private clients. Her current assignment involves infiltrating the radical farming collective Le Moulin in a remote region of France. It seems local water supplies there are being diverted for the use of agricultural corporations to grow corn. The collective wants to force it to stop!

Interestingly, this hardened spy becomes intrigued with an elderly local philosopher named Bruno who advocates pre-industrial—even pre-historic modes of living. The anarchists revere him. Sadie follows his email thread through her hacking skills as he explains his rejection of modern life and his decision to retreat underground and live in a network of caves on his farm. We learn that Bruno has interesting theories about the fate of the Neanderthals—for him, a much misunderstood species.

Pascal is the leader of Le Moulin, a wealthy Parisian that admired the late Guy Debord, the French Marxist theorist and philosopher. The commune involves a diverse population of rural folk, young intellectuals down from the capital, and factory workers discouraged by a failed strike action.

Sadie Smith proves to be a bona fide villain serving powerful interests that requires her to have a level of self-deception to pull off her elite-level deceits. [She used entrapment while working for the FBI, which caused her to be fired.] She is boastful, bitter, telling us about her breasts, her contempt for Italian food, why graffiti is more awful than murder, and that the ‘real� Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport, highways, and nuclear power plants. To be sure, she likes what she does and she does it well.

This is not your usual spy thriller, but Kushner captures well Sadie’s solitary spy character and her internal crisis of ideology. Enjoy!