Lowly Creatures (1881)

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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