Severance
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 M
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Candace Chen is a millennial production coordinator at a Manhattan publisher when Shen Fever sweeps the world, leaving the infected stuck in loops of routine. She keeps coming to her empty office, then leaves the city.
No. The Apple TV+ series Severance (2022) is unrelated to Ling Ma's novel Severance (2018). The novel is a quiet apocalyptic literary novel about a Chinese American office worker; the show is a workplace thriller about memory-divided employees.
Yes. Severance won the Kirkus Prize, the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Fiction, and was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was Ling Ma's debut novel.
Severance was written by Ling Ma, published in 2018 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Severance is 304 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Severance takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Severance is a standalone novel by Ling Ma, not part of a series.
Severance is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.