McNally Jackson's Monthly Bestsellers
Last month's Top 25 bestselling books across all McNally Jackson locations.
An ode to NYC. A bit of romance, a bit of time travel, a lot beautiful, complicated friendship. Dannie has planned out her life pretty carefully, and then a glimpse into the future leaves her reeling. Nothing looks as she would have imagined. She returns to the present moment and spends the next few years fighting to hold onto the life she thought she wanted, even as it becomes increasingly clear it's not the life for her. Super surprising, heartbreakingly sad, full of love and redemption.
— Genay
It helped me better understand how it feels to be an old woman, and a young woman, and a couple, and a person. —Landon
There is the premise of the book: a post-apocalyptic New York City full of the fevered who are doomed to repeat their everyday routines and daily tasks like zombies until they waste away and die; the protagonist, a young Chinese-American woman who joins a ragtag group of survivors headed to a facility near Chicago. And then there are the stomach-dropping, mindboggling scenes of horror, and the general feeling of unease or straight-out nausea that you feel reflected in the recognition of these portrayals of the hamster wheel of late capitalism.
— Bonnie
The apocalypse begins in 2011, but maybe we've been living through it for longer. The Shen Fever pandemic turns people into zombies doomed to repeat their daily tasks til they die = a subtle distinction from our current lives, Ling Ma argues. Severance is a eulogy (read: love letter) for half-loved lives and half-lived selves. Protagonist Candace straddles identities in an indifferent America, a Chinese family navigating the jabs of displacement, a New York that isn't so much sanitized as its hostilities are morphed, an information economy that produces fraught global connections between people who are skilled, but who among us are survive-an-apocalypse skilled? Ling Ma revives '90s global-consumerist satire and, detouring it through messy North Brooklyn parties and romance, collides it with Contagion. Grab a facemask and dive in.
— Gleb
