Anomia

In Euphoria, a small, fictional town that feels displaced in time and space , an affluent but isolated couple have vanished from their suburban home. Their estranged friend, Fir, a local video store employee, is the only person who notices their disappearance. When the police refuse to help, Fir recruits Fain, who moonlights as a security guard, and they set off on a seemingly hopeless search for the lost lovers. Their chance at an answer, if they can ever find it, lies on the wooded edge of Euphoria, where Slip, an elderly trailer park resident, finds a scattering of bones that cannot be identified. Distrusting everyone, Slip undertakes a would-be solitary quest to discover the bones’ identity. Yet secretly, Limn and Mal, two bored, true crime-loving teenagers from the trailer park, are dogging Slip. Determined to bring justice to the dead, Limn and Mal will instead bring the lives of all seven characters into fraught and tangled confrontation.

Beneath the familiar surface of this missing-persons novel lies an unparalleled experiment: the creation of a folkloric alternate reality where sex and gender have been forgotten. Expanding on the work of Anne Garréta’s Sphinx and Jeannette Winterson’s Written on the Body, and joining gender-confronting contemporaries like Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Akwaeke Emezi’s The Death of Vivek Oji,  Anomia is an atmospheric exploration of a possible world, and a possible language, existing without reference to sex or gender.

Praise for Anomia

The unseen, the secret, the mystery. Against the rural backdrop of Jade Wallace’s Anomia, these three elements entangle in an intergenerational and interspecies story of paranoia and intimacies. In the face of the ongoing and often uncaring world of natural decay and animal life, the privacies and pain of each character are both enormous and minuscule in scale. Anomia is the sum of its many multiple parts, a whirling, delightful strange weaving of friendships, suspicion, and small town conspiracy.—Aaron Tucker

A town out of time, a found community whose softness endures in the face of an uncaring society, and an ethereal and multifaceted love story disguised as mystery, Anomia is a haunting narrative of loss and longing. With mycelial plotting propelled by Jade Wallace’s nuanced and atmospheric prose, Anomia is an astonishing debut.—Michael Melgaard, author of Pallbearing and Not That Kind of Place

True to its title, Anomia resists definition, courageously dissolving the divides between genres, genders, and realities. Through lyrical, finely tuned prose, Wallace moves with humanity and grace between the three worlds of a compellingly original cast of characters as they grapple with the complexities of love and loss, the necessity of sacrifice, and the magnitude of the unknown. A novel unlike anything you’ve read before. – Corinna Chong, author of The Whole Animal.