Vivisectors (2026)

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026, this darkly beautiful novel follows a reclusive graduate in a campus love story like no other. In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by vegetation, where power is held in a fragile balance between 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, her boss’s contrarian favorite student, 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. She soon finds herself 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. It has been described as genuinely experimental, relentlessly and rollickingly told, terrifyingly beautiful, and part love story, part ecological fable: a bleakly funny study of ideological certainty. The novel has been praised by Sophie Mackintosh, Michael Magee, Hannah Murray and the Booker Prize judges, among others, with comparisons to Karl Ove Knausgaard and Ottessa Moshfegh, while its author is hailed as a major writer for our age.