November 1, 2024
Huynh's debut, The Fortunes of Jaded Women, was a GMA book club pick and is being adapted for television. Her new novel features Duc Tran, founder of a Vietnamese sandwich chain. He's ready to retire and decides to make his estranged children compete for their inheritance. As they work to revitalize run-down sandwich shops, the siblings also uncover family secrets. Prepub Alert.
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March 1, 2025
The Trần siblings, five sisters and one brother, are pulled back into each other's lives after years of estrangement by their father Duc's will, put together by their family friend and lawyer. Once part of a family that built a successful chain of shops called Duc's Sandwiches, their lives were upended with the disappearance of their mother, Duc's first wife, Evelyn. The siblings are given a year to complete tasks tied to their inheritance. The daughters must revitalize the failing sandwich shops across the U.S., while Jude, the eldest sibling and only son, must marry. The first to succeed inherits everything. A chaotic journey of personal discovery, love, and healing unfolds as the siblings learn more about their family's experiences grappling with racism, generational trauma, and survival as Vietnamese refugees. Laced with humor and heartbreak, Huynh's (The Fortunes of Jaded Women, 2022) storytelling shines through the cacophony of Trần family dynamics. As she tells of family, food, and fractured relationships through her characters, universal themes of belonging and resilience will resonate with readers of all backgrounds.
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May 1, 2025
Five estranged siblings must uproot their lives in order to win their father's inheritance. Jude, Jane, Bingo, Paulina, and Georgia Tr�n have never been close. Their mother, Evelyn, disappeared when they were young, leaving them in Houston to be raised by their father, Duc, the head of a banh mi shop empire. The four daughters spent their youth just waiting to turn 18 and leave home; Jude, the lone son, was the only one to stay behind, siding with their father. Now the siblings, in their 20s and early 30s, have been called back to the family home by Huey Ng�, their father's lawyer and best friend, who informs the five siblings that in the next year they must each accomplish a task that's been set by their father: All four sisters are being sent to a failing shop--one each in Houston, Philadelphia, San Jose, and New Orleans--and told to make it successful again. Jude, meanwhile, has to get married. Whoever finishes first wins the entire inheritance. As the siblings start on their projects, they re-examine their lives, their relationships, and what their family actually means to them. Huynh jumps among the characters' perspectives as well as jumping in time, slowly revealing the story of the Tr�n parents' origins from the time they fled Vietnam to the morning Evelyn left; the story also moves forward as each sibling learns from their ordeal. While this book is clearly filled with love for its characters and Vietnamese American culture, it's an epic family drama squashed into the length of an average novel. The ideas and the writing are good, but they needed more room to breathe. A family story big on plot but short on characterization.
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