Babylon, South Dakota
A Novel
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
From the author of the Carnegie Medal in Fiction winner The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu comes a tantalizing, American West saga about a Chinese American family trying to survive on their Dakota farm as a powerful, mysterious, and morally dubious military secret shapes their lives.
"Lin's gossamer prose is patient and full of wonders."—Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams and An Oral History of Atlantis
When Saul Keng Hsiu and his wife, Mei Lee, move from China to the United States to take possession of a 160-acre homestead bequeathed to them by a distant relative, all they have are the possessions on their back, some hidden gold, and a pocketful of chrysanthemum seeds. After a rocky start and a long, harsh winter, the couple find themselves successfully raising chrysanthemums and livestock, and soon after, a daughter, Mara.
But when representatives from the US Army Corps of Engineers buy an acre of the Hsiu’s farmland and begin building a missile silo, the inexplicable starts to occur: Mara can commune with the animals on the farm, Mei develops a hidden talent for augury, and the chrysanthemums become impervious to everything. When the Hsius learn that the project on their farm is an effort to make America’s nuclear deterrent invulnerable, they see firsthand the long arm of power and empire.
In the years and generations that follow, increasingly impacted by the silo and its residue, the Hsius experience strange, wondrous, and tragic events on their farm. An ambitious epic and an ode to the beauty and glory of our connection to the natural world, Babylon, South Dakota upends the idea of "strangers in a strange land" to become a classic American story. It is a daring novel about how choices reverberate across generations and asks us what we owe to one another.
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APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Tom Lin’s daring novel combines magical realism with the sweeping, multigenerational themes of an epic family saga. In the 1970s, Saul and Mei Hsiu immigrate from China to a 160-acre farm in South Dakota. As they raise chrysanthemums, livestock, and a family, the U.S. military conducts experiments nearby into disciplines such as trans-dimensional physics, which have strange and inexplicable effects on the Hsius and their flowers. We were immediately struck by the sheer otherworldly vividness of Lin’s writing, whether he’s conjuring the rural beauty of the Hsius’ farm or the painful memories of violence and deprivation that sometimes haunt them. The novel’s magic and offbeat, nonlinear narrative feels positively dreamlike, complete with chrysanthemums that grow almost everywhere, a dog that cannot be killed, and a daughter who can speak to animals. It’s a winding, surreal story that somehow crystallizes perfectly in the end.
