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Lowly Creatures: A Novel
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Expected 7 Jul 26In 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.
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.
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Expected publication July 7, 2026
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Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
“Lowly Creatures” is a novel that begins, almost deceptively, in the granular world of soil – of humus, of lumbrics, of hedgerows torn out like nerves – and ends by testing how quickly a moral vocabulary can curdle into a political one. It wants, at once, to be a book about dirt and a book about “the machine”: the administrative state, the venture-capital state, the media state, the self state, all of them grooming the planet into neat rows the way a bad farmer grooms his fields. What makes it so unnerving is how persuasively it argues that these are not separate machines at all. They are one continuous apparatus – and we are its lowly creatures, wriggling, rationalizing, composting our own complicity into stories we can live with.
The author’s great advantage is tonal control. The writing can do earnestness without becoming pious, satire without turning cute, outrage without losing its intelligence. It moves like a documentarian with a poet’s ear, alert to the humiliations of bureaucracy and the subliminal seductions of fame. It is also, in an odd way, a love story – not the bright, solved kind, but the sort in which affection becomes an accelerant for ideology, and intimacy becomes a staging ground for betrayal. One feels, reading it, that the author has spent a long time staring at the modern French landscape – the fields, the think tanks, the sleek start-up offices – and has decided that the only way to describe it accurately is to write a book that changes masks mid-scene. Pastoral becomes courtroom thriller. Corporate farce becomes MeToo-adjacent power play. Environmental lament becomes insurgent manifesto. The point is not that the book is “genre-bending.” The point is that our era forces every story to become several stories at once.
At the center are two men who feel like inverse reflections, or perhaps like two outcomes of the same education. Arthur, the agronomist-turned-eco-radical, wants the world to admit what it has done to the living systems that make it possible. He thinks in hedges and rootlets, in the quiet labor of worms, in the ethics of attention. Kevin, the charismatic cofounder of a worm-based waste start-up, wants the world to buy redemption in bulk. He thinks in decks and valuations, in “impact” as a form of branding, in the easy intimacy of venture money. They are linked by friendship, by a shared technical language, by a sense that they have been appointed to witness something – and then they diverge, each becoming a kind of case study in what happens when moral urgency collides with institutional incentive.
The novel’s early pleasures are procedural. There is the careful accounting of how “green” projects become green theater – a choreography of grants, prizes, photo ops, and the soft blackmail of reputation. There is the way the start-up’s internal logic bends reality to fit its promise. We watch the worm-compost dream harden into an enterprise that must keep growing regardless of whether it is working. Waste is burned; numbers are managed; language becomes solvent. A satirical newspaper is not, in this book, a harmless jester – it is a guillotine with punchlines. And the crisis response team arrives like surgeons who do not treat disease so much as manage optics. “Sidestep, defend, or counterattack,” the consultant says, and suddenly the world feels brutally clarified: not ethics, not truth, not repair – strategy.
The scenes in those offices are written with a delighted, acidic precision. The croissants nobody touches. The hollow performativity of “saving the planet” as corporate mantra. The way power can speak about “truth” as if it were a branding choice. There is a particular horror in how easily the machinery of media turns a lie into a temporary inconvenience, a scandal into a hurdle on the runway toward the next funding round. It feels depressingly contemporary: the era of ESG narratives and “greenwashing” fatigue, the public’s appetite for a spectacular sacrifice, the way a repentant sinner can be more hated than a consistent crook. The book understands that modern outrage is not primarily ethical – it is aesthetic. It wants a story that fits the mood.
Kevin’s unraveling is one of the novel’s sharpest achievements. He is not made into a saint, and he is not allowed the clean self-image of the whistleblower hero. His break is partly conscience, partly nausea, partly self-loathing, partly an almost adolescent desire to disappear and be pure again. When he walks away – stripping his life down to a sleeping bag, a backpack, a road – the book briefly becomes a different creature: a pilgrimage narrative, a pastoral of renunciation, a modern “On the Road” without the romantic fog. But the author refuses to let the countryside become a moral spa. Even simplicity is haunted by consequence. And when Kevin returns to Paris, the institutional apparatus has already reshaped him into the villain it requires, while the true machinery – money, political convenience, the desire to keep a “darling” start-up alive because it is embarrassing for it to die – keeps moving.
Arthur’s path is darker, and the novel’s bravest risk is that it takes him seriously. It does not treat eco-radicalism as a punchline or a pathology. It allows Arthur’s grief – the literal grief of watching a hedge destroyed, of seeing soil treated as an inert medium rather than a living commons – to register as grief. The book’s pages on soil feel like an argument against the modern habit of abstraction. We speak of “ecosystems” the way corporations speak of “synergy,” as if life were a diagram. Arthur insists, sometimes with almost religious fervor, on the reality of the living: the worms, the microbes, the intricate and ancient balance of cooperation underground. When the system responds to him with procedural violence – orders, excavators, laughter – his rage becomes cosmological. He begins to see ecocide not as a policy failure but as a moral regime, an entire civilization pattern.
That is where “Lowly Creatures” becomes most uncomfortable: it shows how easily an ethics of care can be transmuted into a politics of extermination. Arthur writes a manifesto that links ecological devastation to the ways human beings are regimented, labeled, surveilled, and flattened into obedient rows. It is, in passages, genuinely persuasive – and then it slips, almost inevitably, toward a rhetoric of purification. The book is honest about this seduction. There is a narcotic pleasure in feeling that you have pierced the veil, that you have found the “keystone” whose removal will bring the whole edifice down. The author’s satire sharpens here, but it is not the satire of dismissal. It is the satire of recognition: yes, this is what it feels like to be right and powerless – and yes, that feeling is dangerous.
The Extinction Rebellion / Extinction Revolution pivot is one of the novel’s coldest jokes, and one of its most plausible. Movements, in this book, are brands with shadow brands. There is always a Disneyland version for respectable liberals and a clandestine version for those who have decided persuasion is over. The young envoys who arrive to recruit Arthur speak with the chilling calm of a generation raised on collapse discourse and tactical manuals – and the book lets their logic unfold until it reaches its appalling conclusion. Violence is not merely an option; it becomes a metric. Power is seized, then the leaders must die, to prevent tyranny – and if they do not die willingly, they are executed by their comrades. It is both grotesque and weirdly coherent, like a bad science-fiction plot that begins to sound like a policy proposal when you are tired enough.
And then the book does what many politically ambitious novels avoid: it stages the revolution. Paris becomes a theater of insurgency, and the author writes those scenes with a frightening clarity. The mobs are not singing. They are shooting. The state is not fumbling with crowd control. It is mobilizing the military. The familiar symbols – the obelisk, the Senate, the gardens – are re-lit as elements in an urban battlefield. There are moments of bitter comedy (a Crit’Air sticker nearly derailing history), moments of prophetic intoxication (Arthur atop a statue, hearing “Predator!” like a Roman title), moments of sudden, irreversible loss. The death of Léa, unarmed and loyal, punctures the ideological fever with the simplest fact: bodies are bodies, and no metaphor restores them.
The novel’s political imagination is not limited to France. It understands our age as a mesh network – not only of activism and surveillance but of contagion. A coordinated uprising ripples across cities; communications collapse; panic becomes infrastructural. One hears, behind these scenes, the real-world anxieties of recent years: the fragility of supply chains, the dependence on navigation apps, the way a state of emergency can become normal language. The book is steeped in the atmospherics of now – climate doom, protest movements, backlash to “performative” activism, the dark glamour of sabotage discourse, the re-weaponization of “security” – without ever turning into a topical checklist.
What saves “Lowly Creatures” from being merely a well-executed provocation is its final act, which is unexpectedly tender. Arthur’s end is not a heroic martyrdom staged for legend. It is intimate, messy, human – the body’s poison and convulsions, the soft astonishment of finding comfort in another person’s breath, the absurdity of hearing a bird sing as the world collapses around you. The reunion with Kevin in the Luxembourg Gardens – two former friends, one moving toward death, one moving toward a kind of life that is no longer ambitious – is written with a gravity that refuses melodrama. The book does not absolve them. It does not need to. It simply insists that human beings remain human even when they are most monstrous, and that love, too, can be complicit.
The coda, with Kevin living in a van, selling worm composters, reading Stoics by torchlight, feels like the novel’s quiet argument against the romance of total rupture. Posthumus, the start-up, promised a technological salvation that turned out to be partly fraud and partly fantasy. Arthur promised a revolutionary salvation that turned out to be slaughter. Kevin’s modest worm-composter project is not “a solution” in any grand sense – it is a practice. A thing that works sometimes, in certain conditions, for certain people, and that asks for patience rather than apocalypse. When Arthur’s body is returned to the land in compost bags and an oak sapling is planted above him, the book gives us an image that could have been sentimental and makes it unsettling instead: the long time scale of decomposition, the slow certainty of return, the possibility that the only revolution that truly happens is the one nature conducts without us.
Comp titles suggest themselves almost automatically, because “Lowly Creatures” is in conversation with a whole shelf of recent climate and political literature: the eco-satirical unease of “The Ministry for the Future,” the moral combustion and activist obsession of “The Overstory,” the procedural cynicism of corporate exposé narratives, the insurgent fervor and sabotage debate popularized by “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” even the apocalyptic urban choreography of “Children of Men” when institutions begin to fail and the state’s face becomes armored. Yet the book’s particular signature is French: the pleasure in ideas, the distrust of institutions, the elegance of polemic, the way comedy and despair share the same table.
If you asked me what the book is “about,” I would say: it is about the spiritual hunger that hides inside ecological crisis. Not spirituality as comfort, but spirituality as a question of allegiance – what do you serve, what do you obey, what do you call “life,” what do you call “success,” what do you call “enough.” It is also about the way language can anesthetize us. “Sustainability,” “transition,” “impact,” “innovation” – words that can become herbicides, clearing away complexity. Arthur’s best line is not one of his slogans but his sense that we are concreting over our hearts as well as our land. The book, at its best, makes you feel that concrete drying.
As a work of fiction, it is not perfect. Its architecture is occasionally too neat in its symmetries, too eager to demonstrate the irony of one system mirroring another. Some of the ideological monologues risk overexplaining what the narrative has already made clear. And the revolutionary sections, precisely because they are so vividly staged, can feel like the novel is flirting with the spectacle it claims to despise. But these are also, in a strange way, the book’s honest flaws – the flaws of a novel that is trying to think in public, to risk being excessive because moderation feels like another form of complicity.
The result is a book I would rate 88 out of 100 – not because it offers an easy wisdom (it does not), but because it understands that the climate crisis is not merely a scientific or political fact. It is a crisis of meaning, of intimacy, of attention – a crisis that will keep producing both saints and monsters, often in the same person. “Lowly Creatures” does not ask you to like its protagonists. It asks you to recognize the conditions that made them possible – and then, with a shiver, to wonder what those conditions are making of us right now.
The author’s great advantage is tonal control. The writing can do earnestness without becoming pious, satire without turning cute, outrage without losing its intelligence. It moves like a documentarian with a poet’s ear, alert to the humiliations of bureaucracy and the subliminal seductions of fame. It is also, in an odd way, a love story – not the bright, solved kind, but the sort in which affection becomes an accelerant for ideology, and intimacy becomes a staging ground for betrayal. One feels, reading it, that the author has spent a long time staring at the modern French landscape – the fields, the think tanks, the sleek start-up offices – and has decided that the only way to describe it accurately is to write a book that changes masks mid-scene. Pastoral becomes courtroom thriller. Corporate farce becomes MeToo-adjacent power play. Environmental lament becomes insurgent manifesto. The point is not that the book is “genre-bending.” The point is that our era forces every story to become several stories at once.
At the center are two men who feel like inverse reflections, or perhaps like two outcomes of the same education. Arthur, the agronomist-turned-eco-radical, wants the world to admit what it has done to the living systems that make it possible. He thinks in hedges and rootlets, in the quiet labor of worms, in the ethics of attention. Kevin, the charismatic cofounder of a worm-based waste start-up, wants the world to buy redemption in bulk. He thinks in decks and valuations, in “impact” as a form of branding, in the easy intimacy of venture money. They are linked by friendship, by a shared technical language, by a sense that they have been appointed to witness something – and then they diverge, each becoming a kind of case study in what happens when moral urgency collides with institutional incentive.
The novel’s early pleasures are procedural. There is the careful accounting of how “green” projects become green theater – a choreography of grants, prizes, photo ops, and the soft blackmail of reputation. There is the way the start-up’s internal logic bends reality to fit its promise. We watch the worm-compost dream harden into an enterprise that must keep growing regardless of whether it is working. Waste is burned; numbers are managed; language becomes solvent. A satirical newspaper is not, in this book, a harmless jester – it is a guillotine with punchlines. And the crisis response team arrives like surgeons who do not treat disease so much as manage optics. “Sidestep, defend, or counterattack,” the consultant says, and suddenly the world feels brutally clarified: not ethics, not truth, not repair – strategy.
The scenes in those offices are written with a delighted, acidic precision. The croissants nobody touches. The hollow performativity of “saving the planet” as corporate mantra. The way power can speak about “truth” as if it were a branding choice. There is a particular horror in how easily the machinery of media turns a lie into a temporary inconvenience, a scandal into a hurdle on the runway toward the next funding round. It feels depressingly contemporary: the era of ESG narratives and “greenwashing” fatigue, the public’s appetite for a spectacular sacrifice, the way a repentant sinner can be more hated than a consistent crook. The book understands that modern outrage is not primarily ethical – it is aesthetic. It wants a story that fits the mood.
Kevin’s unraveling is one of the novel’s sharpest achievements. He is not made into a saint, and he is not allowed the clean self-image of the whistleblower hero. His break is partly conscience, partly nausea, partly self-loathing, partly an almost adolescent desire to disappear and be pure again. When he walks away – stripping his life down to a sleeping bag, a backpack, a road – the book briefly becomes a different creature: a pilgrimage narrative, a pastoral of renunciation, a modern “On the Road” without the romantic fog. But the author refuses to let the countryside become a moral spa. Even simplicity is haunted by consequence. And when Kevin returns to Paris, the institutional apparatus has already reshaped him into the villain it requires, while the true machinery – money, political convenience, the desire to keep a “darling” start-up alive because it is embarrassing for it to die – keeps moving.
Arthur’s path is darker, and the novel’s bravest risk is that it takes him seriously. It does not treat eco-radicalism as a punchline or a pathology. It allows Arthur’s grief – the literal grief of watching a hedge destroyed, of seeing soil treated as an inert medium rather than a living commons – to register as grief. The book’s pages on soil feel like an argument against the modern habit of abstraction. We speak of “ecosystems” the way corporations speak of “synergy,” as if life were a diagram. Arthur insists, sometimes with almost religious fervor, on the reality of the living: the worms, the microbes, the intricate and ancient balance of cooperation underground. When the system responds to him with procedural violence – orders, excavators, laughter – his rage becomes cosmological. He begins to see ecocide not as a policy failure but as a moral regime, an entire civilization pattern.
That is where “Lowly Creatures” becomes most uncomfortable: it shows how easily an ethics of care can be transmuted into a politics of extermination. Arthur writes a manifesto that links ecological devastation to the ways human beings are regimented, labeled, surveilled, and flattened into obedient rows. It is, in passages, genuinely persuasive – and then it slips, almost inevitably, toward a rhetoric of purification. The book is honest about this seduction. There is a narcotic pleasure in feeling that you have pierced the veil, that you have found the “keystone” whose removal will bring the whole edifice down. The author’s satire sharpens here, but it is not the satire of dismissal. It is the satire of recognition: yes, this is what it feels like to be right and powerless – and yes, that feeling is dangerous.
The Extinction Rebellion / Extinction Revolution pivot is one of the novel’s coldest jokes, and one of its most plausible. Movements, in this book, are brands with shadow brands. There is always a Disneyland version for respectable liberals and a clandestine version for those who have decided persuasion is over. The young envoys who arrive to recruit Arthur speak with the chilling calm of a generation raised on collapse discourse and tactical manuals – and the book lets their logic unfold until it reaches its appalling conclusion. Violence is not merely an option; it becomes a metric. Power is seized, then the leaders must die, to prevent tyranny – and if they do not die willingly, they are executed by their comrades. It is both grotesque and weirdly coherent, like a bad science-fiction plot that begins to sound like a policy proposal when you are tired enough.
And then the book does what many politically ambitious novels avoid: it stages the revolution. Paris becomes a theater of insurgency, and the author writes those scenes with a frightening clarity. The mobs are not singing. They are shooting. The state is not fumbling with crowd control. It is mobilizing the military. The familiar symbols – the obelisk, the Senate, the gardens – are re-lit as elements in an urban battlefield. There are moments of bitter comedy (a Crit’Air sticker nearly derailing history), moments of prophetic intoxication (Arthur atop a statue, hearing “Predator!” like a Roman title), moments of sudden, irreversible loss. The death of Léa, unarmed and loyal, punctures the ideological fever with the simplest fact: bodies are bodies, and no metaphor restores them.
The novel’s political imagination is not limited to France. It understands our age as a mesh network – not only of activism and surveillance but of contagion. A coordinated uprising ripples across cities; communications collapse; panic becomes infrastructural. One hears, behind these scenes, the real-world anxieties of recent years: the fragility of supply chains, the dependence on navigation apps, the way a state of emergency can become normal language. The book is steeped in the atmospherics of now – climate doom, protest movements, backlash to “performative” activism, the dark glamour of sabotage discourse, the re-weaponization of “security” – without ever turning into a topical checklist.
What saves “Lowly Creatures” from being merely a well-executed provocation is its final act, which is unexpectedly tender. Arthur’s end is not a heroic martyrdom staged for legend. It is intimate, messy, human – the body’s poison and convulsions, the soft astonishment of finding comfort in another person’s breath, the absurdity of hearing a bird sing as the world collapses around you. The reunion with Kevin in the Luxembourg Gardens – two former friends, one moving toward death, one moving toward a kind of life that is no longer ambitious – is written with a gravity that refuses melodrama. The book does not absolve them. It does not need to. It simply insists that human beings remain human even when they are most monstrous, and that love, too, can be complicit.
The coda, with Kevin living in a van, selling worm composters, reading Stoics by torchlight, feels like the novel’s quiet argument against the romance of total rupture. Posthumus, the start-up, promised a technological salvation that turned out to be partly fraud and partly fantasy. Arthur promised a revolutionary salvation that turned out to be slaughter. Kevin’s modest worm-composter project is not “a solution” in any grand sense – it is a practice. A thing that works sometimes, in certain conditions, for certain people, and that asks for patience rather than apocalypse. When Arthur’s body is returned to the land in compost bags and an oak sapling is planted above him, the book gives us an image that could have been sentimental and makes it unsettling instead: the long time scale of decomposition, the slow certainty of return, the possibility that the only revolution that truly happens is the one nature conducts without us.
Comp titles suggest themselves almost automatically, because “Lowly Creatures” is in conversation with a whole shelf of recent climate and political literature: the eco-satirical unease of “The Ministry for the Future,” the moral combustion and activist obsession of “The Overstory,” the procedural cynicism of corporate exposé narratives, the insurgent fervor and sabotage debate popularized by “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” even the apocalyptic urban choreography of “Children of Men” when institutions begin to fail and the state’s face becomes armored. Yet the book’s particular signature is French: the pleasure in ideas, the distrust of institutions, the elegance of polemic, the way comedy and despair share the same table.
If you asked me what the book is “about,” I would say: it is about the spiritual hunger that hides inside ecological crisis. Not spirituality as comfort, but spirituality as a question of allegiance – what do you serve, what do you obey, what do you call “life,” what do you call “success,” what do you call “enough.” It is also about the way language can anesthetize us. “Sustainability,” “transition,” “impact,” “innovation” – words that can become herbicides, clearing away complexity. Arthur’s best line is not one of his slogans but his sense that we are concreting over our hearts as well as our land. The book, at its best, makes you feel that concrete drying.
As a work of fiction, it is not perfect. Its architecture is occasionally too neat in its symmetries, too eager to demonstrate the irony of one system mirroring another. Some of the ideological monologues risk overexplaining what the narrative has already made clear. And the revolutionary sections, precisely because they are so vividly staged, can feel like the novel is flirting with the spectacle it claims to despise. But these are also, in a strange way, the book’s honest flaws – the flaws of a novel that is trying to think in public, to risk being excessive because moderation feels like another form of complicity.
The result is a book I would rate 88 out of 100 – not because it offers an easy wisdom (it does not), but because it understands that the climate crisis is not merely a scientific or political fact. It is a crisis of meaning, of intimacy, of attention – a crisis that will keep producing both saints and monsters, often in the same person. “Lowly Creatures” does not ask you to like its protagonists. It asks you to recognize the conditions that made them possible – and then, with a shiver, to wonder what those conditions are making of us right now.
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