Missouri Williams’s darkly absurd and wilfully grotesque debut novel, The Doloriad, concerned itself with the aftermath of a world-shattering catastrophe. Her second takes place in what feels like the beginning of one. The Vivisectors is set in an ancient and unnamed university town – we could call it Oxford or Cambridge, but let’s not – which is rapidly being overwhelmed by vegetation: avenues lined with “orange columns of flamevine and purple bougainvillea”, arches “dripping with wisteria”, the inescapable “stink of a distant magnolia”. A fraternity of mysterious gardeners seek to keep the chaotic foliage in check, but they are hamstrung by a bitter dispute with university officials. Power games and proxy battles ensue. It is a hot summer and decay is rampant: revolution is in the air.

As in recent work by Sophie Mackintosh or Julia Armfield, this verdant backdrop casts an ominous glow over the action, though Williams writes with a singular brand of Ballardian ferocity – she revels in the wretched and the craven. The locus of the novel’s intensity is its narrator, Agathe, an alarmingly cynical young woman. She views everyone she meets as a tragic case, and knows that nothing lies between her and the same sad designation but her ability to see through the stories they’re telling themselves. She rejects self-expression and desire, refusing anything that might compromise her sense of separation and superiority. Her judgments are swift, conclusive and brutal.

After an unsuccessful suicide attempt, Agathe’s mother is left mute and paralysed. Hearing the news, Agathe feels nothing but annoyance at how her routine has been interrupted. In the wake of this, Agathe’s father – a well-known writer, “famous for his insight” – takes the opportunity to rant at length about how she was the root of all the problems in her parents’ marriage. He demands that Agathe spend time with her mother, who is now in a wheelchair; she is told to take her for regular walks.

On the first of these occasions, Agathe realises that she cannot push the motorised wheelchair through the unchecked and thickening suburban shrubbery. Her solution is punishingly rational: Agathe sits in her mother’s lap and operates the chair from there. “She was a lump, scarcely more alive than the chair in which she was sitting,” she thinks. “There was nothing stopping me from treating her the same way.” Later, Agathe realises her mother has wet herself. “I felt a dampness spreading beneath my thighs and soaking through the thin fabric of my skirt. For a moment I thought she might say my name. She didn’t.” It is hard to say which aspect Agathe finds more pitiable, the urination or her desire to be acknowledged.

Agathe is employed as a personal assistant by an unnamed academic at the university, and she is rarely more cruel than in her comments on her employer, “a mountainous woman with huge, rolling hips” whom she finds unutterably pathetic. The academic seeks to become the confidante of a handsome young graduate student named Adam. She sets Agathe a mission: befriend Adam, find out what he’s thinking and relay it back to her. Thus, the romance plot is set in motion.

How Agathe navigates her feelings for Adam and asserts her independence from her family will define her arc – an outline which could sum up any number of novels. Williams does not unthinkingly recreate this classic formula, she deploys it with purpose, concealing it beneath the gothically overstuffed surface. Ideas are fired at the page: identity politics, family trauma, climate crisis, comic plays and fables, academia, labour, bureaucracy. There is a savage rush of description and dissection happening throughout. But for all the layers of alienation and abjection which encrust Williams’s tale, there remains a model campus romance novel at its heart. It is as if Agathe is burning through cover, until she is finally forced to confront the one story she really can’t comprehend: the love story. And if The Vivisectors is a love story, it is also about love stories – what counts as one, the form it should take, how it might come to be believed by its participants.

Agathe’s story pivots on her repressed need to overturn the anaesthetised narrative she has been telling herself, to excise what she calls the “dark toad in the cistern of my selfhood”. Adam is the vehicle for this transformation: it is no coincidence that we only learn Agathe’s name when, halfway through the book, he asks for it. She is dumbfounded when he takes her hand. It is initially a little disappointing, given the wealth of imagination on show, that when the climactic revolution takes place, it leaves things looking so familiar. But perhaps that is the final sting in the tail, a deception disguised as sweetness – a last test, then, of cynicism, this time the reader’s own.

This summer, when I was signing books after an event, I met a therapist who had bought my novel and who was planning to suggest it to her client, too. I Will Crash depicts a difficult sibling relationship and it was a reading experience she thought her client would find helpful. “We’re still behind in how we talk about siblings,” she said. “The taboo is strong. We’ve got parents down,” she continued, “but for siblings, it’s still early.”

Her comment was gratifying – what she expressed was partly why I had wanted to write a sibling relationship in the first place. With a relationship between a parent and a child, there are well-known dynamics at play: a power imbalance, a duty of care, expectations. Larkin’s “They fuck you up, your mum and dad” has been repeated and passed on – a great line turned cliche, diminished by repeated acknowledgment like a stone eroded on a beach. A parent-child relationship remains complicated but our scaffolding for how to talk about it in adulthood is stronger. With siblings, the terrain becomes unreliable. What are they: twisted reflections of ourselves? Allies? Enemies? What are we allowed to expect of them?

By some curious shake of the snow globe, a host of recent novels have, like mine, taken the subject on. In May came The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes and Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors, both about a group of sisters distanced from each other; there was also further focus on Jente Posthuma’s What I’d Rather Not Think About – a novel about a woman mourning the death of her twin brother – thanks to the International Booker prize. Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, published in June, was told from the perspectives of three bristling sisters. And now we have Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, about a fraught relationship between two brothers.

Intermezzo alternates between Ivan and Peter, brothers whose relationship is laced with misinterpretations. During the novel, they become temporarily estranged; Ivan forcing the hand of his frustration. The tension is exacerbated by a crisis – their father has recently died. Crises strike all these novels. The sibling relationship is by default ongoing so it’s not surprising that writers use events to initiate change and tension-point. Some, like Armfield, Hughes, Mellors and Rooney, switch between sibling perspectives to study conflicting interpretations. In Posthuma’s novel and my own, the pain is in the impossibility of seeing the other side.

Though these novels are remarkably different from one another, essential truths recur: how siblings can see each other in straitjacketed roles, set prematurely into an understanding of the other; how inextricable the relationship can be even if unpleasant. Friends can pass out of lives slowly, gently, until their significance is permitted to fade. Romantic relationships can be ended and eventually accepted as having not been right. But relationships we do not choose – that we are born with or pick up soon afterwards – we can feel tied to. In positive sibling relationships, that’s the joy: one, two, three, more people who will always be connected to you and care for you. But when relationships are irreconcilable, the elevation of blood ties becomes a trap.

In Julia Armfield’s Private Rites, Irene and Isla have a shared distance to their half-sister, Agnes; dismissing her while assuming a relationship. “It is not my fault,” Agnes says to them at one point in the novel, “‘if you have certain expectations of our relationship that I have never invited you to have.” In another scene, Irene sits back in her chair and studies Isla. “Only you make me like this, she wants to say. You think I’m like this and that makes me worse”. And then, in an inevitable baton-switch, she makes her own supposition: “She has always felt Isla might quite easily turn out to be keeping a hunchback in a bell tower … or whatever else it is extremely uptight people often turn out to have been doing in private.” The joke houses her own assumption (Isla being uptight); failing to contemplate what makes Isla turn cold.

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In Intermezzo, Ivan blocks Peter’s number after an argument at a restaurant. Soon after, the woman Ivan is seeing, Margaret, asks him whether everything is OK between him and his brother. He keeps his gaze downwards and says they’ve never really been friends.

“Yeah, he says. It’s whatever. You know, he told me once before there’s no point trying to talk to me, because I can’t speak any normal language anyway. And that I have a weird accent. International Chess English, he called it. The way I speak.”

His response is loaded with the fate of a failed sibling relationship: cached memories tailored to make the decision to end a relationship convincing. Yet the shards sound wrong. They sound like a man summoning past hurts in order to mask something that is harder to explain.

Since the publication of I Will Crash, I have met readers who bought the novel or came to events specifically for the recognition. Two sisters – friends with each other but mutually estranged from their brother – both bought the book and seemed energised. Another, whose estranged brother had died recently, knew it would be a hard read but felt gratified by the prospect. There was a recurring acknowledgment that this relationship was hard to find in fiction.

This new shelf of books – varied in style and approach yet grouped by an attention to the murkiness of sibling relationships – is not just a coincidence but an opportunity. Beyond the pleasure of language and craft, novels feed us empathy, recognition, different models for life. Here is an opportunity to sit more comfortably with imperfect relationships, and to be reinforced when life grants us situations that we can imagine better yet cannot resolve.