In Euphoria, a small, fictional southern Ontario 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 conventionally narrative surface of the text lies an unprecedented effort. Expanding on and modernizing the work of Sphinx by Anne Garreta and Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, and joining gender-confronting contemporaries like Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead and The Death of Vivek Oji by Akwaeke Emezi, Anomia is the first novel in English written entirely without reference to sex or gender.
