The Forces: A Novel

Part odyssey, part existential enquiry, The Forces tell the story of a girl at odds with the social order, from one of the most exciting young writers in France today.

In this wild, incandescent novel from one of France's most important writers, a young woman takes on the hardships of the world with poetic clarity and shows us how much strength, courage, and hope can be found in a single life.

Setting off on a journey through her childhood, a young woman wanders through the city—from a lesbian bar to an abandoned house of the dead, from the top of a mountain to the banks of a river—to illuminate the gallery of invisible social, psychological, linguistic, and political mechanisms that pass through and inhabit us. These are the Forces.

Laura Vazquez's extraordinary new novel is a modern-day Odyssey: a book about life and lifeforce, about how to be and how to stay alive in this world, in all its violence and tenderness. In hypnotic prose, it is a deep dive inside the human mind, dissecting the structures that influence our thought and that questions—and gloriously affirms—the true meaning of the human experience.