Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance. "A stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring." —Michael Schaub, NPR.org “A satirical spin on the end times-- kind of like The Office meets The Leftovers.” --Estelle Tang, Elle NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: NPR * The New Yorker ("Books We Loved") * Elle * Marie Claire * Amazon Editors * The Paris Review (Staff Favorites) * Refinery29 * Bustle * Buzzfeed * BookPage * Bookish * Mental Floss * Chicago Review of Books * HuffPost * Electric Literature * A.V. Club * Jezebel * Vulture * Literary Hub * Flavorwire Winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award * Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction * Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award * Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel * A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 * An Indie Next Selection 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. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers? A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.

Opinions of this novel ranged from very to mildly positive, and so no one had anything terrible to say about Severance. There were flaws with the book that everyone basically accepted. A few passages were clunky and the quote-science-unquote of the fever was very weak and inconsistent, and the book was much better when it stuck to being evocative and ambiguous. But we all loved the ambiguity with which Ma treated her material. The beautifully unclear distinction between the workaday habits of Candace's NYC life and a fever that causes obsessive repetition was something we kept digging into. The novel simply did a phenomenal job of calling into question the value of routine and nostalgia. We spent a lot of time talking about how China fit into a story about a worldwide fever, and marveled at the beautiful depiction of Candace's parents, one representing the idea of moving forward and breaking ties and the other clinging to the past, as a model for how the fever worked and why the survivors could resist it. A lot of the discussion centered around how precise the novel was -- did Ma carefully construct a detailed Candace who was flirting subtlely with being diseased the entire time, or was Ma more impressionistic throughout and deliberately leaving connections between Chinese labor, NYC living, and a zombifying fever vague? Ultimately, it was this lack of clarity we appreciated, and it allowed us to forgive the less successful world building in favor of indulging the beautiful description of an abandoned New York City, the disturbing image of half-dead people repeating mindless, slightly varied patterns, and the deep critiques of consumerism and religion (as Candace sees Bibles as a unchanging book you exploit underpaid labor to simply recreate multiple times) that wrap all the disparate elements together. We ultimately agreed that Ma had created a very dark, but very compelling story, one in which all nostalgia is suspect and all habits are potentially signs of a soulless life, and embodied it in a deeply representative narrator. Severance is not an uplifting book, but it's a well told story with some very strong and subtle themes.