The Vivisectors

‘Genuinely experimental, relentlessly and rollickingly told’ Booker Prize Judges 2026
‘Reads more like Karl Ove Knausgaard at the end of the world … sharply intelligent’ Sunday Times
‘Williams writes with a singular brand of Ballardian ferocity – she revels in the wretched and the craven’ Guardian
‘Grips you with an invig­or­at­ing sense of its sheer dif­fer­ence from any­thing else out there’ Daily Mail
‘Part love story, part ecological fable … a bleakly funny study of ideological certainty’ The Times
‘A compelling exploration of love, whether with another person or with God’ Financial Times
‘Astonishingly good … she has immediately left the realm of the cult classic … and has landed firmly in the “best of her generation” conversation’ Defector
‘As brilliant as it is dark … unlike anything I’ve read before’ Vulture
‘Her prose folds itself into the literary legacy of writers such as Clarice Lispector, Anna Kavan, Rachel Kushner and Ottessa Moshfegh’ Our Culture
‘Williams’s eye for the absurd keeps things light and fleet-footed’ Literary Review
‘Moves between satire, suspense and philosophical inquiry’ Tank Magazine
‘This is the modern rupture – our crisis of meaning and spiritual malaise shaped into a novel unlike any other’ Paul Lynch, author of Prophet Song
‘Exquisitely crafted and phenomenally clever … left me awestruck by its terrifying beauty. I can’t stop thinking about it’ Hannah Murray, author of The Make-Believe
‘An astonishing novel by an astonishing writer … I am in awe’ Michael Magee, author of Close To Home
‘Delightfully grotesque … The anti-feel good hit of the year’ Fernando A. Flores, author of Brother Brontë
‘A wicked and beguiling novel, written with the kind of precision other writers can only dream of’ Amy Twigg, author of Spoilt Creatures
‘Beautiful, disturbing … I adored this book’ Harriet Armstrong, author of To Rest Our Minds & Bodies
‘Hypnotic and sublimely disturbing’ Sara Baume, author of Seven Steeples

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 appeared in The Nation, The Baffler, The Believer, Granta, and The Drift.

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