India, Sept. 22 -- Imagine every acerbic, barbed, caustic thought you've ever had, all stitched together into one highly quotable novel. 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's here that Agathe finds herself employed by 'a deluded rich woman', a professor whose work is riddled with errors and thoughts embedded with zeal. The author's words remind one of what it's really like to inhabit the mind of an impassive teen. This includes the particularly polarising introduction of her mother, 'the dead woman in a chair', who is left catatonic after a failed attempt at suicide. Soon, the girl's path collides with Adam, who is 'far too alive for... our crumbling necropolis'. Agathe hates him at once, and yet the reader find her oscillating in her own detached way to a love story as old as time: an enemies-to-lovers trope in the workplace. In this satirical account, the sentences are long, the paragraphs offer sparse breaks, and the chapters have little to no respite from Agathe's bleak perspective. She, as the protagonist, is a personification of the sullen teenage phase that most of us have experienced. Yet, the brilliantly articulated sentences create a dreadfully delicious tale of reluctant romance in a surreal dystopian world. What's interesting in Williams' style of storytelling is the unexpected timing; like when one learns Agathe's name only halfway through the story. It's also here, at this juncture, that the narrative breaks free of her passivity and acquires an agency separate from her stoic drift. The city in the story comes undone, the university is shown in a flux, the politics begins to unravel, and Agathe and Adam's romance finally starts blooming. And by this time, Adam tells her, 'You've come to mean something to me. I'd like to mean something to you.' This essentially sums it up all. Well, aren't we all victims of the human condition where the only medicine is love? Title: The Vivisectors Author: Missouri Williams Publisher: HarperCollins Price: Rs.699...