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The Vivisectors
Written by Missouri Williams
- Longlisted
- The Booker Prize 2026
- Published by 4th Estate
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Coursing with icy suspense and rendered with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for a broken era
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 threatens to rupture her carefully managed routine: 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 remains unmoved. But when her boss instructs her to turn double agent and gather information by befriending Adam, Agathe 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?
In The Vivisectors, Missouri Williams holds up a mirror to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of blazing spiritual reckoning.
The Vivisectors was longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026.
Missouri Williams
Missouri Williams is a novelist, playwright and editor
More about Missouri Williams A bracing antidote to the cosy campus and the dark academia novel, The Vivisectors is genuinely experimental, relentlessly and rollickingly told – and in places truly menacing
The Booker Prize 2026 judges
What the judges said
‘A bracing antidote to the cosy campus and the dark academia novel, The Vivisectors instead imagines higher education as a transparent citadel where human axolotls masquerading as professors and students are bent on drawing and quartering each other with no mercy, as their nameless city is overtaken by relentless vegetable growth. No one is protected, everyone is exposed, it is highly doubtful anyone is learning anything, and on top of all that vines are coming up your legs. Genuinely experimental, relentlessly and rollickingly told – in places truly menacing – The Vivisectors is the rare title that actually earns its name.’
What the critics said
Kirkus
‘Williams is an heir to writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, whose female protagonists often possess a passivity and an icy detestation of society that teeters on the brink of nihilism. “I’ve always wanted to break people,” Agathe confesses, while also acknowledging, “It was beneath me to try to direct the course of my fate.” That Williams’ novel reads like an allegory plays up the moral and philosophical dimension, but it’s never clear what the story is allegorizing. Is this a savage takedown of academia? A portrait of the late Anthropocene’s climate woes and social disconnect? A grim meditation on cancel culture? Xenophobia? A psychological parable of falling in love?
A flinty, withholding novel, though full of dark intelligence.’
Hannah Williams, Financial Times
‘With its quasi-apocalyptic setting and unorthodox relationships, it is tempting to compare the novel to Williams’s first, The Doloriad (2022). That book told the story of a monstrous, incestuous family trying to survive post-disaster with only video tapes about Saint Thomas Aquinas for company. The Vivisectors feels both stranger in style and more conventional in its overarching thesis. It is best described as prismatic, a metaphor that Williams deploys throughout the book to describe the effect of multiple perspectives and interpretations.’
Ian Maleney, the Guardian
‘There is a savage rush of description and dissection happening throughout. But for all the layers of alienation and abjection which encrust Williams’s tale, there remains a model campus romance novel at its heart. It is as if Agathe is burning through cover, until she is finally forced to confront the one story she really can’t comprehend: the love story. And if The Vivisectors is a love story, it is also about love stories – what counts as one, the form it should take, how it might come to be believed by its participants.’
James Webster, Defector
‘The Vivisectors is a slippery and provocative novel, but in it, I saw something like hope. For all of its gothic trappings and the gorgeous gravity of Williams’ writing, The Vivisectors is a propulsive, insightful, and ultimately moving novel. It is a book whose own existence solidifies its central point. If you take a chance on the things that Missouri Williams has to say—if you believe in something beyond subjectivity—you might just reaffirm why we like fiction in the first place.’
