Book list
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Carnegie Medalist Lin (The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, 2021) returns with a spectacular second novel featuring three generations of a Chinese American family caught in a U.S. government cover-up. Hsiu Keng and Lee Mei immigrated to Babylon, South Dakota, to claim 160 acres bequeathed by an unknown kinsman, remaking themselves as Saul Keng Hsiu and Mei Lee. Stalwartly overcoming initial difficulties, the couple settles into growing remarkably hearty chrysanthemums and raising livestock baptized by their only child, Mara. Curiously, Mei sees the future, and Mara can talk to animals. On Mara’s second birthday, men representing the military appear, once with translator Abram Song, who becomes a lifelong acquaintance. The government buys an acre of Hsiu land, building silos and, inexplicably, an exact duplicate of the Hsiu homestead. Quotidian life continues. The parents age, and Mara falls in love with Luke, a military official’s son who defies his racist father to marry her. They have two children. But many more peculiar phenomena occur. There's an unkillable three-legged dog, Saul requiring a 159-day sleep cure, and Mei walking through nonexistent doors. Vague details about the mysterious government-owned acre and its nuclear secrets are revealed piecemeal: Project Methuselah, the Qian Device, prototypes, multiple realities, escaping death. Lin’s magical epic proves to be an extraordinarily immersive literary labyrinth.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Lin's unique imagination and storytelling prowess has readers eagerly awaiting his next book.

Publishers Weekly
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Lin (The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu) spins a beguiling tale of a secret U.S. military program and its strange effects on a family of Chinese immigrants. The time period isn’t specified, but the story appears to take place sometime during the Cold War. Saul Keng Hsiu, 37, and his 33-year-old wife, Mei Lee, have fled a famine in China with only some gold, chrysanthemum seeds, a suitcase, and an old leather knapsack of belongings. They settle on a prairie in South Dakota, where government officials visit the couple’s farm and offer to buy an acre of land from them. Saul and Mei agree, and the Air Force builds a nuclear missile silo on the property as part of a mysterious plan that Saul later learns is called Project Methuselah. The project causes strange things to happen: volcanic ash falls from the sky, Mei discovers that she can practice augury, their young daughter Mara learns she can communicate with farm animals, and the chrysanthemums they grow turn out to be hardy aphrodisiacs. Gradually, the novel takes on more speculative dimensions, as Saul learns Project Methuselah is actually an experimental nuclear weapon deterrent developed with intelligence stolen from the Chinese. The story can be tough to follow, but it’s packed with intriguing fabulist turns. This offbeat novel will stay with readers. Agent: Lisa Queen, Queen Literary. (May)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

A beguiling work of speculative fiction set in the American outback. If Lin’s eccentric story gains wide circulation—and it deserves to—then South Dakota may soon be thought of as a place where innocent dogs are routinely shot. Hsiu Keng and his wife, Lee Mei, have immigrated from Mao-era China to a 160-acre farm seemingly in the middle of nowhere. Keng takes the biblical name Saul, but Mei, nothing if not resolute, stands firm in keeping her Chinese name, along with habits such as squirreling away gold against the day when everything goes pear-shaped. Saul dreams of growing chrysanthemums—but the federal government arrives to take a chunk of their property for a missile silo. Strange things happen then: This isn’t just the site of an intercontinental ballistic missile meant to blast Cold War opponents to smithereens, but also a laboratory for a transdimensional contraption that promises eternal life, if not necessarily in this dimension. Enter a dog, shot repeatedly and yet immortal, freed by an airman named Abram Song and taken in by Saul and Mei’s daughter, Mara. Things in Lin’s sophomore novel begin to take ever stranger turns: A self-styled alchemist enters the picture and the paterfamilias falls into a long, deathlike sleep (echoes of García Márquez’s magic realism), while Abram’s assurance that Project Methuselah “protects its users absolutely from the possibility of death” portends a hard SF twist worthy of Cixin Liu’sThe Three-Body Problem (2014). There are ghosts, or at least thermodynamic traces, and hidden chambers, and scheming warmongers and bureaucrats, and a mad Strangelovian colonel (“Even if World War III kicks off, those guys down there won’t die.…in the worlds where they don’t die, well, they knock the dust off their coveralls and fire their missiles right back”), and a pleasantly meandering storyline that, against the odds, ties everything together. Oh, and plenty of hidden gold, too. A thoughtfully written, genre-crossing novel of great ingenuity. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.