LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026 · Indian subcontinent edition
In a famous but crumbling university city being slowly swallowed by vegetation, power rests on a fragile truce between the academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners. Agathe spends her days listlessly propping up the career of her fraudulent professor boss.
Then a scandal breaks on campus. Adam — a contrarian, and her boss's pet student — falls into open conflict with a rising young professor, each man claiming discrimination. As the crisis swallows the university, Agathe's boss instructs her to befriend Adam and report back. She finds herself pulled both into the events tearing the city apart and towards the alluring student at the centre of them. But in a fight over the truth, can anyone be taken at their word?
The second novel from the author of The Doloriad is a campus story unlike any other: icily suspenseful, violently precise, part love story and part ecological fable. The Booker judges called it genuinely experimental, relentlessly and rollickingly told.
Like Karl Ove Knausgaard at the end of the world — Sunday Times
About the author
Missouri Williams is a novelist, playwright and editor. Her debut, The Doloriad, won the 2023 Republic of Consciousness Prize and was shortlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. The Vivisectors was acquired by 4th Estate in an eight-way auction and named one of the most anticipated novels of 2026.
Edition details
- 4th Estate (HarperCollins) paperback, 256 pages
- Export edition — available exclusively in the Indian subcontinent
- Published 21 May 2026
