In this award-winning, satirical French novel that asks how anyone can live according to their principles inside the system they’re trying to change, two young men vow to save the planet with earthworms, but their shared mission soon sends them down opposite paths.

Lowly Creatures follows the twin destinies of two young men, Kevin and Arthur, each of whom 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 projects are threatened by 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, and now available in a lively, playful English translation, Lowly Creatures will appeal to readers of Tony Tulathimutte, Michel Houellebecq, and Eleanor Catton. Gaspard Koenig digs deep into the contradictions, temptations, and doubts of a generation, turning worms, humus, and hedgerows into an unexpectedly fascinating lens on the contradictions of climate activism, greenwashing, startup culture, and capitalism.