The Vivisectors
In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by vegetation, where power is held in a fragile balance between the academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, Agathe spends her days listlessly propping up the career of her fraudulent professor boss. One day, a campus scandal erupts: Adam, a contrarian and the pet student of her boss, comes into heated conflict with a rising young professor, with both men claiming discrimination.
As the crisis consumes the university, Agathe’s boss instructs her to gather information by befriending Adam. Agathe soon finds herself both caught up in the events tearing the city apart and increasingly drawn towards the alluring student at the heart of it all. But can anyone be taken at their word in a struggle over the truth?
Coursing with icy suspense and rendered with violent precision, 'The Vivisectors' is a new kind of love story for a broken era and a novel of blazing spiritual reckoning.
About the author
Missouri Williams is the author of 'The Doloriad', which won the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her work has also appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The Believer, Granta and The Drift. Her second novel, 'The Vivisectors', was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.
Judge Kate Briggs on The Vivisectors
"The final chapter of Missouri Williams’s The Vivisectors is titled ‘The Future Sublime’ and I think this is it: a lush, verdant, light-saturated take on bad nature, contaminated politics and rotten institutions that is both awesome and terrifying. Switching between Agathe’s merciless narration and a wild chorus of gardeners and spores, The Vivisectors ends by cutting itself open to reveal the tender nervous system that was quivering beneath Williams’s extraordinary prose all along. Singularly strange, ambitious and brilliant."