Lowly Creatures

In this award-winning French novel, two friends from contrasting economic backgrounds, one privileged and one working-class, are drawn and eventually divided by their shared passion for earthworms and their mission to save the environment--young men whose parallel destinies illustrate the difficulty of entering adulthood in a world threatened by ecological disaster.

Lowly Creatures follows the twin destinies of two young men, Kevin and Arthur, each who has vowed to dedicate his life to earthworms to save the earth from impending ecological disaster. Their shared passion brings them together at a Paris agri-tech school, then drives them apart as they pursue divergent paths.

Arthur, an anxious, idealistic, man raised in a bourgeois family, moves to rural Normandy with his girlfriend to attempt a Thoreau-like experiment of introducing earthworms to the soil of his grandfather's abandoned farm. Kevin, the handsome, free-spirited, pansexual son of farmers from the French countryside, partners with an ambitious business school classmate to create a worm-composting startup. Arthur thinks Kevin has sold out, while Kevin is frustrated by the hopelessness of Arthur's plan.

Their relationship devolves further when Arthur's shallow, elitist girlfriend moves back to Paris, where she becomes romantically involved with Kevin. As the men's lives spiral out of control--experiencing fraud, failed experiments, eco-terrorism, and other dark challenges--they eventually worm their way back into each other's world, undeniably changed, yet still committed to each other.

A surprise literary sensation in France, Lowly Creatures is a provocative and philosophical exploration of how idealistic young people navigate the moral dilemma between living according to principle and working within the capitalist system to create change. Brilliantly insightful and inciteful, Gaspard Koenig's award-winning novel digs deep into the contradictions, temptations, and doubts of a generation.

Gaspard Koenig is an award-winning French novelist, philosopher, essayist, and politician. After schooling at the Lycée Henri-IV, he was admitted to the École normale supérieure lettres et sciences humaines in 2002, studied at Columbia University, and then obtained the agrégation in philosophy in 2004. He served as a speech writer for Christine Lagarde, France's Minister of the Economy, worked at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London, where he oversaw institutional affairs, and founded the think tank Generation Libre in Paris. In 2021, he created the political movement "Simple." He has been a teacher throughout his career. He lives in Paris.