India, Sept. 22 -- Imagine every acerbic, barbed, caustic thought you've ever had, all stitched together into one highly quotable novel, where not a single sentence will ever go where you would predict. This is Missouri Williams' The Vivisectors.

The novel places its heroine, Agathe, at the heart of a sardonic tale set in a fictional university town with a post-apocalyptic, overgrown vegetation problem. It is 'a dying city' that has 'become too exhausted'. It's here that Agathe finds herself employed by 'a deluded rich woman' working as a professor, whose work is riddled with errors and whose thoughts are embedded with zeal.

With the turn of every page, the words remind you what it is really like to inhabit the mind of an impassive, poc...