LOST STEP

Benoît Coquil

Why you should take a look at it:
√ Emotional coming-of-age journey
√ Unique cultural backdrop
√ Award nominated prose

Lost Step is a luminous and atmospheric debut novel set in the agricultural heartland of

southwestern France, where economic precarity, climate anxiety, and buried desire converge

during one sweltering summer.

Seventeen-year-old Marlon watches helplessly as his family farm edges toward collapse. In a

desperate attempt to save it, he builds an enormous maze in the surrounding cornfields, hoping to

attract tourists and generate enough income to keep the farm alive. But as the labyrinth grows, so

too does Marlon’s sense of disorientation. Caught between loyalty to his family and the pull of

an undefined future, he begins to navigate the volatile terrain of first love, sexual awakening, and

inherited expectations.

With striking emotional intelligence and vivid, sensuous prose, Benoît Coquil crafts a coming-

of-age novel that is both deeply rooted in rural life and universally resonant. Lost step evokes the

intensity of adolescence with rare precision while offering a subtle portrait of a disappearing

rural world shaped by debt, drought, and social isolation. The novel combines the intimacy of

queer self-discovery with the mounting tension of ecological and economic decline, creating a

work that feels urgent, contemporary, and profoundly humane.

Perfect for readers of Édouard Louis, Douglas Stuart, and Brandon Taylor, Lost Step is a tender,

unsettling exploration of what it means to lose one’s way — and to discover oneself in the

process.

Benoît Coquil, born in 1989, is a writer and a professor and researcher in Latin American

literature. He is the author of Petites choses (Payot, 2023) which was listed for the Prix Femina

and translated into several languages.