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Cover of Severance by Ling Ma

Severance

  • 304 pages · about 5 hours
  • First published 2018
  • 6 editions

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1 About this book

Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.

So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.

Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew.

Good for readers who want: satire and dystopian fiction.

  • Satire
  • Dystopian fiction
  • Science fiction
  • Epidemics
  • New york

2 About Ling Ma

Born 1983

Ling Ma is an American novelist and associate professor at the University of Chicago. Her first book, Severance, won the Kirkus Prize in 2018 and was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of 2018 and shortlisted for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second book, Bliss Montage (2022), won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and The Story Prize. She is a 2024 MacArthur Fellow.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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