Literary fiction out now: THE VIVISECTORS by Missouri Williams, OFFENSES by Constance
THE VIVISECTORS by Missouri Williams (4th Estate £16.99, 304pp)
Williams scored a cult hit with her morbidly violent post-apocalyptic debut, The Doloriad, which was published by Liverpool indie Dead Ink and won the Republic of Consciousness prize for small-press fiction.
Given that her new book comes to us courtesy of a big corporate imprint, you might think that Williams has sold out. No chance.
Set in a city overrun by plants, it’s an off-kilter campus novel told by an academic assistant caught up in a row about overseas students.
Themes ripped straight from the headlines – cancel culture, plagiarism, university funding – are folded into a mirage-like narrative that is anything but journalistic. Avoiding specificity, the mazy sentences buzz with mounting dread and mordant humour.
Taxingly strange, yes, but it grips you with an invigorating sense of its sheer difference from anything else out there.
OFFENSES by Constance Debré (Tuskar Rock £10.99, 96pp)
French author Debré, formerly a criminal barrister, made her name with an autofictional trilogy dramatising the aftermath of her decision to walk out on her husband and job to live with a woman and write.
Debré’s new book, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman, drops the first-person ‘I’ for a free-floating voice that returns to her past milieu to trace the impact of a murder on a housing estate outside Paris.
A teenager robs an old woman to settle his drug debt and run away with the mother of his two-year-child, but fatally bungles the job.
In a tone pitched somewhere between a coroner’s report and a sermon, Debré delves into the killer’s upbringing – poverty, violence, abuse, more drugs – as well as those of others on his estate.
A bracing dose of reality, yet not without a smidgen of smugness.
Give Me Everything You’ve Got is available now from the Mail Bookshop
GIVE ME EVERYTHING YOU’VE GOT by Imogen Crimp (Bloomsbury £14.99, 320pp)
This summer-hazed tale of artistic ambition and same-sex desire complicates the psychological terrain of Crimp’s first novel, A Very Nice Girl, about a young opera singer’s awkward age-gap affair.
Fledgling film director Ruby is struggling with a script when she finds herself taken under the wing of a feminist auteur she has long idolised.
A dream, on the face of it, but when Ruby finds herself living alone for a week with the director’s 20-year-old daughter, an uneasy triangle develops.
Shot through with satire on the culture industry’s demand for autobiographical stories of women’s lives, the plot resembles a cross between Zoë Heller’s Notes On A Scandal and Yael van der Wouden’s recent hit The Safekeep.
Tense and intelligent, with an excruciating set-piece climax.