Babylon, South Dakota

By Tom Lin

Book Overview

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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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316576271
• ISBN13: 9780316576277
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

A New Fantasy Adventure For A New Family in America

Thank you to NetGalley and the Hachette Book Group for the opportunity to review this book as an advance reader copy. A beautiful book about immigration through the lens of a multi-generational Chinese family. Their story and plight are doused with adventure through fantasy and mysticism. Taking place in a fictitious city in North Dakota, set primarily during the Cold War era. The story had so many twists and turns I couldn't put it down! However, the ending just didn't sit well with me. For me, it felt confusing and left me guessing, which is probably exactly what the author intended. I highly recommend this novel, especially to fantasy readers.