Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Historical adventure fiction

THE THOUSAND CRIMES OF MING TSU

Tom Lin

A remarkable debut novel - think Tarantino's DJANGO UNCHAINED, but featuring a Chinese-American former rail worker, plus a dash of the supernatural with a clairvoyant prophet and a traveling magic show.

Set in the American West, THE THOUSAND CRIMES OF MING TSU is a revenge story in the vein of THE REVENANT. The time is circa 1860-1870s, when Chinese immigrants were working on the Central Pacific railroad. Ming Tsu is an orphan, having been raised by an adoptive father in California to be a trained killer.

He's heading west, across Utah, Nevada, and California, with some scores to settle - a page in a notebook containing the names of men he must kill, most of whom were involved some years earlier in the abduction of his wife, Ada, with whom Ming is trying to reunite. (Other than revenge, that is the ultimate goal of his journey.) One by one Ming crosses off the names on the list as he goes, collecting as he goes an eclectic group of friends. His constant companion is the Prophet, a fellow Chinese American and a bona fide clairvoyant.

Tom Lin is a twenty-four-year-old graduate of Pomona College in California. The author, who was born in China, emigrated with his family to New York when he was four, by way of Australia. He is now based in California. This is his first novel.

Available products
Book Published 2021-06-01 by Little Brown

Comments

In Tom Lin's book the atmosphere of Cormac McCarthy's west, or that of the Coen Brothers' True Grit, gives way to the phantasmagorical shades of Ray Bradbury, Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao, and Katherine Dunn's Geek Love. A story full of archetypal echoes with a velocity and perspective all its own, this is a fierce new version of the Westward Dream.

French: Gallimard ; Italy: Stile Libero/Einaudi

This is a major work that enlarges our view of the Wild West and marks Lin as a writer to watch. Read more...

The prophet in Tom Lin's extraordinary novel refers to his friend Ming as a 'man out of bounds.' Likewise The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu defies the boundaries of genre, at times standing staunchly within a perfectly researched historical world, and then strolling nonchalantly past those barriers into the world of magic and haunted souls. It's a story that's both brilliantly vibrant and brutally dark.

A book out of bounds, that saves the western by blowing it to bits. Don't wait for the movie.

Tom Lin's award-winning debut, THE THOUSAND CRIMES OF MING TSU, has secured a major TV/film deal at competitive auction, for a television series. Topic Studios will produce alongside Theresa Kang-Lowe via her Blue Marble Pictures. Read more...

Infused with magic realism, Lin's beautifully imagined first novel is an extraordinary epic with page-turning, often cinematic action that transcends the parameters of genre fiction. A brilliant debut, impossible to put down.

Tom Lin's debut novel, a classic Western featuring a Chinese American protagonist, was a special pleasure to read. Ming Tsu is on an odyssey of revenge that rambles across the vastness, harshness, and myriad dangers of the Old West. He has a pistol and a list of past acquaintances for whom he intends the pistol to mean finis. There's blood and humor in Lin's telling, wit and wide knowledge. The nuanced prose is firm and evocative, and we have a gritty, luminous, and fantastical take on the era and the people. Ride this one hard, folks, and put it up wet.

[A] poetic and cinematic story... impressive.

The page-turner has copious amounts of action that leans heavily into raw violence that is perfect for readers who ask, "Is there anything like a Quentin Tarantino movie as a book?"

Addictively gruesome... Lin's novel manages to enhance a wild, wild western with Odyssean devotion, magic realism and historical racism, to create quite the unlikely love story gone awry.. Lin cleverly reclaims the language as he marks each of the story's three parts with untranslated Chinese characters--they're "hunt," "trip," "life," respectively. With dexterous agility, Lin showcases Ming's multi-faceted identity as a native-born American, a builder of transcontinental railroads, a rebel against racist laws, a killer of injustice--and maybe even a hero who might finally get the girl. Read more...

In this unforgiving landscape, which Lin vividly and meticulously describes in prose whose music is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's, even a rainstorm can take on mythical proportions... His story is a new old narrative: part revenge fantasy, part classic bloody tale of the Old West.

The American Library Association announced the 2022 Carnegie Medal winners and Tom Lin's THOUSAND CRIMES OF MING TSU was named the winner of the [very prestigious] Medal for Excellence in Fiction! Read more...