Severance

A Novel

by
No cover

Ling Ma: Severance (2018, Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

304 pages

English language

Published Feb. 9, 2018 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

ISBN:
978-0-374-71711-7
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Review of 'Severance' on 'Goodreads'

Not your usual dystopian / end of the world novel. Actually, for the main character, her pre-end life does not much differ from her post-end life. And maybe that's the point and the metaphor here. I have to confess not being able to put it down until I was done. The end comes, but it comes very slowly and gradually, which makes it all the more horrifying. The zombies - or as they are called here, the fevered, those afflicted by the shen fever that kills almost everybody - are not walking-dead-style zombies. They go through their most routine activity, repeatedly, mechanically, mindlessly, until they waste away.
I saw a lot of review mentioning how funny the book was. That is was not my read at all (I could be wrong, obviously), again, I was more horrified by the slow decay of the world and the progressively crushing solitude of …

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Subjects

  • Fiction, dystopian
  • New york (n.y.), fiction
  • Fiction, satire