On March 10, 2021, Air France Flight 006 from Paris is forced to fly through a cumulonimbus supercell of unprecedented size during a routine landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Among the passengers, Victor Miesel, a writer and translator, abruptly writes a book manuscript titled The anomaly from start to finish, then commits suicide.

Unbeknownst to the public, the Chinese government, having secretively captured a duplicate passenger jet of a different flight, has independently postulated the simulation hypothesis as well.

The living Miesel steps back into his writing career, his newfound fame giving him a second chance to meet a missed connection.

In a televised debate, a philosopher suggests that the duplicated flight was a test to the inhabitants of their simulated reality, while Miesel argues that human behavior will not change as a result.

Later, in October 2021, another duplicate of Air France Flight 006 appears, and is destroyed by fighter jets under new procedures replacing Protocol 42.

Among others, there is the series of letters "u.l.c.é.r.a.t.i.o.n.s.," a reference to the extended heterogrammatic poem "Ulcérations" by Georges Perec, which in 1974 was the first publication of La Bibliothèque oulipienne.

During a round table discussion held on 14 May 2021 at the Maison de la Poésie [fr] in Paris, Hervé Le Tellier and nine of the translators of L'anomalie spoke at length about the final page.

[9] On 6 May 2021, a circulation of one million copies was declared by Éditions Gallimard and GfK; this figure constitutes a threshold rarely reached by a Prix Goncourt-winning novel.

[3] The writer Pascal Fioretto [fr] wrote a pastiche of the novel, entitled L'Anomalie du train 006 de Brive, published by Éditions Herodios in June 2021.

[16] During an online "literary café" organized by the Escales des Lettres on April 16, 2021, Hervé Le Tellier announced that a television adaptation of the novel is in production.