Livid

Verso, Francesco. Livid (translation of Livido by Sally McCorry, with F. Verso). Sydney: Xoum Pty Ltd., 2014[1] (Xoum reported to have changed its name to "Brio Books" in 2018).[2]

From the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (note 1 above):

Synopsis: Set in a future where consumerism has made much of Earth into a junk heap, Peter Payne is a trash former, a scavenger, a kid under the thumb of a world too brutal to stay human. When his one chance for love and to change his fate is violently torn away from him, he embarks on a quest to rebuild the object of his obsession.

Filled with themes of cybernetics, prosthetics, consumerism, over-consumerism, robotics and transcendence, this is a novel that expands on classic tropes to build a world as deep and compelling as the main character.

For the junk, cf. and contrast WALL-E and other works with a dystopian setting with an Industrial-junkyard esthetic: e.g. in film SOLDIER, CRITTERS 4, VIRUS.

Livid is discussed by Fernando Porta in SFRA Review #314 (Winter 2015 [sic]): pp. 35-36.[3] Relevant here, his explanation of that literal rebuilding, and an alternative way of life in a variety of cyberspace.

Livid can be read as a sort of bildungsroman of the narrator, Peter Pains, who is in love with Alba, an artificial being with the conscience and memory of a woman already dead (a nexhuman, as these rather fortunate [sic] citizens of the future are called in the novel). [...] Alba has been killed and dismembered by a band [...] interested in collecting and selling the reusable parts and technological components found in the huge areas of waste surrounding the megalopolis where the story is set. * * *

This is a complex drama interrogating the dilemma of life and death[...], when existence has turned either into an empty game of survival – as for the trashformers - or into personal addiction to videogames that dominate televisions and computers: this is the virtual gamesphere of those who want to forget the tragedy of the present to pursue their electronic victories. (Porta, pp. 35-36).

RDE, finishing, 10Aug21