Rachel Kushner appears on my screen from her hotel room, having freshly arrived in Adelaide. “I just got here,” she says, apologising for the lighting before we begin. Kushner's visit to Australia marks a return of sorts. “I was here before for the Writers Festival, but it was over a decade ago… I’m looking forward to re-experiencing it,” she tells me. And this Sunday, she will speak at the Sydney Opera House as part of their feminist festival: All About Women.

The reason for her heralded return is her latest novel, Creation Lake, which has been hailed as both radical and deeply immersive. At its heart, a covert agent infiltrates a group of young leftist activists in France, observing, manipulating, and ultimately betraying them. It’s noir-tinged, politically urgent, and eerily prescient. “I knew that I wanted to write a novel that was about this group of young people who decamp from Paris to this very remote rural area of France to, like, build a collective life together," Kushner tells me. "And I knew that they would be set on a collision course with the French police."

Finding the novel’s voice was a journey. “I didn’t know who was going to tell the story for, like, the first three years that I was writing it,” Kushner admits. Eventually, the answer emerged in the form of a narrator unlike herself. “I think embodying the voice of someone so malicious wasn’t my first instinct… It took me a while to come around to that, like, ‘Oh. This is the book.’”

The book is deeply engaged with questions of power, surveillance, and betrayal, themes Kushner found essential to explore through the narrator’s perspective. Kushner also tells me she was interested in paying homage to the genre of noir and the detective novel. But not in a way that felt rigid. “At the same time, I didn’t really feel beholden to the rules of that genre, and I’m not a practitioner of the genre at all," she says. "I enjoyed borrowing a little bit of the power of noir, particularly in how the internal mechanisms of the plot work. Most writers end up having to rely on coincidence, but when your narrator is a manipulator, there’s no need for coincidence – because she has everything within her design.”

"I enjoyed borrowing a little bit of the power of noir, particularly in how the internal mechanisms of the plot work."

Kushner says has always resisted simplistic narratives about her own trajectory as a writer. When asked about her early inspirations, she demurs. “I don’t really know how to answer that. I only know that I’m a writer. It’s what I’ve been doing for decades now.” She studied writing, but not formally she says. “The novel started to interest me after college. It seemed like a way to synthesise all these different components of reality and how I experience it.” Writing, for her, is an active process of discovery. “I feel like I have access to – or am in dialogue with – parts of my brain that are smarter than I am on any given day.”

Her fascination with infiltration – the tension between presence and absence, knowing and being known – shapes Creation Lake profoundly. “I had seen that there were these people who had infiltrated leftist activists, both in California, where I’m from, and in Europe… I found all that rather shocking, just in terms of these people acting like sort of the cliché of the agent provocateur.”

“The novel started to interest me after college. It seemed like a way to synthesise all these different components of reality and how I experience it.”

Beyond espionage, the novel is steeped in questions of environmental activism. “The book in that regard kind of speaks for itself… It’s about the question of water, and about how difficult it is to make a living as a farmer now in Europe,” she says. Kushner describes a character, Bruno, who views modern civilisation as “heading toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car”.

Despite the critical acclaim, including a Booker Prize shortlisting, Kushner tells me she is grateful, but remains detached from literary recognition. “I don’t write for cultural success or critical accolades… If they allow me to keep making my living writing novels, then that’s wonderful, but they are never the destination.”

Tickets to see Rachel Kushner at the Sydney Opera House as part of All About Women are on sale now on the Sydney Opera House website. Kushner's novel Creation Lake is available to purchase at all good book stores.