The Forces

A sexy, daring and darkly comic odyssey: a young woman rails against conformity to create a life outside the social order by Prix Goncourt winning poet Laura Vazquez

Winner of the Prix Décembre

The Forces follows an unnamed narrator on an intoxicating journey through an unnamed French city from scenes of childhood to city streets, an underground cult, a lesbian bar, a drug den, through screens and memories, and into the wilderness until she ultimately discovers her vocation as a writer.

Laura Vazquez writes with a raw, vital and poetic force, dissecting everyday life and the violence of politeness with radical lucidity, exploring language, labour, desire, bodies, capitalism, belief, love. She asks what it means to live truthfully in a world structured by lies, and whether tenderness, attention or language itself might offer a form of salvation.

Bold, unsettling and original, The Forces is one of those rare novels that invents a new way of seeing the world and will leave you irrevocably altered.

'Unique, poetic, and radical – witty and so beautiful it brings tears to your eyes.' Édouard Louis

‘Her prose has a marked propulsive power… There is a dreamlike quality to her writing, reminiscent of Kafka, Beckett and Dostoevsky’ TLS

© Laura Vazquez 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027