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 Koenigs award-winning novel digs deep into the contradictions, temptations, and doubts of a generation.