Candace Chen works a dead-end job in New York coordinating the production of specialty Bibles in Chinese factories. Shen Fever arrives — a fungal infection that doesn’t kill people so much as lock them into repeating one familiar routine forever, folding the same shirt, setting the same table, until they starve. Candace keeps going into the empty office because her contract says to, photographs the emptying city for a blog, and eventually joins a small group of survivors led by a man who is turning into something worse than the fever. It’s a pandemic novel, an immigrant novel, and a very funny satire of work, published two years before it got uncomfortable.
Severance