The Forces

A blazing, darkly comic odyssey: a young woman rails against conformity to create a life outside the social order, from one of France’s most important and prize-winning writers.

'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

Winner of the Prix Décembre

The Forces follows an unnamed narrator on an intoxicating journey through an unknown French city from scenes of childhood to 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. Every turn illuminates the forces that form our daily lives – the violent and invisible structures at work on our language, our bodies, our beliefs, our labour, our desires.

Laura Vazquez writes with a raw, vital and poetic power. 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 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.