Ling Ma's Novel "Severance" - A Story of Survival in a Post-Apocalyptic World

Lisa: I enjoyed reading this book

Germany on Apr 22, 2023

Amazon Customer: This was bought as a present - the recipient loved it.

United Kingdom on Feb 24, 2023

GJ Rumble: I bought this as it was on so many top 10 lists for Indy sci-fi authors. I don’t know why, it bored me. Didn’t care at all about the heroine or those she met. Undoubtedly a talented author though. Meandering annoying back story butting in all the time. Life’s too short. Left it on the train seat unfinished.

United Kingdom on Nov 09, 2022

Brian Shevory: I’ve been meaning to read this book for a while, and now with a raging global pandemic, I thought it might be the right time. Severance is not the kind of apocalyptic, dystopian, zombie book that I expected, but that was also a pleasant surprise. The book has as more to do with identity and discovering our true selves as well as questioning the role of materialism, corporations, technology on our inability to connect with others and develop an authentic identity.
Severance alternates between the narrator’s present, as a refugee/survivor banding together with other survivors of the Shen Fever Epidemic, her past, moving to NYC, meeting her partner, and finding work, and her parents’ past, emigrating from China to the US. I was a little confused at first, but I really enjoyed the different narrative streams that focused on her past. Sometimes it seemed like these were different novels/stories, but in the latter half of the book, I could better understand how these stories were interconnected. Interestingly, they all deal with different forms of severance—whether it is a severance from a home, culture, language, parents, loved ones, work, material goods, the internet. All...

United States on Jun 04, 2021

Duane Schneider: A few months ago, I was looking for books on office life (I know, exciting!) and came across "Severance" on a list. I recently picked it up to read during "quarantime" not even knowing that the book is primarily about life during and after a worldwide pandemic. But a portion of "Severance" does involve Candace's--the protagonist's--life working in an NYC publishing/distribution firm. She ends up going to work every day, despite more and more people sickening with "Shen Fever," an incurable illness contracted by inhaling fungal spores that originated in China. Ling Ma's evocation of the illness is quite good. When people become "fevered," they continue going about their most common activities, such as folding sweaters at a retail store or driving a taxi cab, but they're totally on auto-pilot and are eventually killed or die of exposure, exhaustion. etc. They're like totally non-threatening zombies, yet still chilling, maybe more so for their lack of engagement with the non-fevered. Candace becomes the final employee to flee her office and indeed one of the last to flee New York City, and this really made me think about my own life. How long would I stay in my office if the pandemic...

United States on Jul 22, 2020

Jess: I am really not sure what to make of this story. The first couple of pages were really exciting, with a few laugh out loud parts, but then after that it kind of fizzled out for me. Other reviewers have detailed the story line better than I could but I did not consider Candace to be an over privileged millennial. I thought she was presented as a rather lost young woman who missed her dead parents and basically needed mothering. I felt rather sad for her. However, that was it. No engagement with any of the characters or the story, because quite honestly there wasn't any real story that I could discern. In fact I found it all a bit boring. I read the book twice because I had completely forgotten that I had already read it because I found it too bland to remember. That is a shame because what is written is written well. It is just so 'flat'. Nothing much really happens. Even the psychopathic Bob was rather uninteresting. This story could have been developed so much better. The only thing that really held my interest was the NY Ghost part. Now that was very interesting and the irony of remaining at your post and being paid large sums of money to do so when there is no-one left to spend...

United Kingdom on Sep 28, 2019

Joanne Sheppard: Ling Ma's Severance is narrated by Candace Chen, a millennial living in New York as the world succumbs to an epidemic of Shen Fever, a disease from China spread by fungal spores which cause sufferers to descend into a sort of trance and repeat in their final days the meaningless routines that linger in their memory: "they could operate the mouse of a dead PC, they could still drive stick in a jacked sedan, they could run an empty dishwasher, they could water dead houseplants."

The fevered are essentially harmless, so this isn't a zombie apocalypse horror story - it's a quiet, thoughtful novel in which the real threat comes not from the fevered but the survivors, who, in the case of the group Candace joins, predictably descend into cultish behaviours that can only end in trouble.

The post-apocalyptic storyline, however, is really only a small part of the book. Interwoven with Candace's experiences after Shen Fever strikes is the story of her relationship with her parents, their move from Fuzhou, China to Utah, and her years living in New York after graduating. In New York she abandons her ambitions to become a photographer and takes a job working in production for...

United Kingdom on Apr 15, 2019