In a way, Ling Ma's shocking and ferocious novel, Severance, is a play on the 'Why I left New York' theme, but it's one you'll actually want to read. The pieces are usually bittersweet and elegiac seldom, if ever, do they say 'My company transferred me to the Denver office' or 'I just got tired of paying $20 for a hamburger.' If you've spent much time reading personal essays on the Internet, then (a) you're a masochist, and (b) you've probably noticed a subgenre of the form that involves the author explaining why they left New York. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. And our days, like theirs, continue in an infinite loop.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Severance Author Ling Ma My memories replay, unprompted, on repeat.

But what is the difference between the fevered and us? Because I remember too, I remember perfectly. Shen fever being a disease of remembering, the fevered are trapped indefinitely in their memories. For me, it was a great escape, even if claustrophobic, suffocating and mesmerizing. However, if you know that it will cause you nightmares, then better leave it be. Therefore, if your way to cope with pandemic stress is watching apocalyptic movies, I recommend Ling Ma’s book with a clear conscience. Through Candace’s eyes you see the fate many immigrant families and see how New York, together with the entire capitalist world, devours the people living in it.

On one hand, it is a story about a pandemic and one of many dystopian visions of the end of the world, on the other – a metaphor of late capitalism seen through the eyes of millennials. Between the descriptions of the worsening pandemic, we learn about her life – about trying to find herself, about looking for a job, about coming to terms with how the world really works. The only hope is that you belong to the minority that is immune to the fever called “Shen”.Ĭandace, the main character, is one of the last people to leave New York. An incurable disease that damages the nervous system. New York, a pandemic of a new disease, which broke out in China (!). It is worth noting that Severance was not inspired by the Covid-19 pandemic – the book was published in 2018. It took me a year to write the description for this book, because I had to digest it and then wait a bit longer – after all, how to write a dystopian book with a pandemic as its main plot in the middle of a global pandemic? Severance by Ling Ma drew me in from the first page the more nervous I became about what might happen in the rest of the book, the more I couldn’t put it down.

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