Danmei fans would be happy with this kind of suffering if it means they can read Tangstory’s novels in English.
Via Lactea, a danmei publisher located in Canada that focuses on both Chinese and English translated novels, announced they had licensed Living to Suffer and its sequel Till Death Us Do Part. Both novels are single-volume series with Adrian S. Mei translating and Michaela editing. Release dates have not yet been announced.
Living to Suffer
The cover is simple and features a mountainous terrain with birds flying about. On the back, a lone umbrella is on the ground as rain falls. The back cover provides the synopsis:
In a ruined shrine, a torrential summer rain becomes the canvas for a fateful encounter. Shen Liangsheng, gravely wounded after a mission, lies bleeding until doctor Ch’in Ching discovers him beneath the umbrella’s painted reeds–fragile as hope, urgent as necessity.
What begins as an act of mercy–a healer rescuing a broken weapon–spirals into a passionate, inevitable entanglement of love and loyalty. A stalk of a nocturnal herb. A brush dipped in vermillion. A bowl of noodles on a chilly night. An alley carpeted in red… Each step they take together is a step closer to destiny.
Yet their love, fierce and fleeting, blooms amidst the the pain of impending doom. It’s a devotion drenched in unknown longing, a luminous moment in lives bound by sacrifice: the doctor tempting fate, and the warrior discovering the stirrings of emotion too late.
Till Death Us Do Part
The cover for Till Death Us Do Part features a neighborhood in the 1930s and is similarly designed quite simply. The back cover synopsis reads:
In 1930s, Tientsin, a city caught between a fading dynasty and encroaching empires, two lives cross like ink strokes on fragile rice paper. Ch’in Ching, a schoolteacher and crosstalker whose patriotism smoulders beneath his calm exterior, moves through the world with a scholar’s grace and a loyal heart. Shen Liangsheng, a cunny playboy and heir to a powerful warlord-turned-capitalist, wears his elegance like a mask, hiding wounds that wealth and privilege cannot mend.
Their meeting is like a half-remembered melody, distant yet familiar. What begins as curiosity sharpens into something more–an intimacy both tender and perilous, at once a refuge and a battlefield. Their bond grows quietly, like ivy scaling old walls, steadfast even as the world shakes beneath them.
Yet differences cast long shadows. Loyalties clash, choices divide, and years of silence settle where closeness once lived. And when the waters rise to swallow the city, so too do emotions once thought buried surge back with undeniable force. In a world ruled by power and peril, desire and duty, wealth and conscience, they must decide what remains when everything else is swept away.
Release dates for the books have not yet been announced.
Source: Via Lactea
