Succession meets Crazy Rich Asians in this chaotic, darkly funny romp about the lengths a wealthy family will take to ensure the birth of a male heir from the gay black sheep of their clan.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Justinian Huang’s Lucky Seed, which releases on November 11th 2025.
The billionaire Sun Clan of Greater Los Angeles is your typical American family, with power-struggling aunties, emasculated uncles, scheming cousins, scandalous secrets and a fortune teller on retainer. But at the end of each combative day, the Suns are chained together with golden handcuffs, whether they like it or not.
Yet strange storms are a-brewing. Their matriarch, Roses Sun, is grappling with an existential crisis: she must produce a male heir that bears the clan’s surname. She fears that if her generation is the one in which their esteemed lineage ends, they will be punished as “hungry ghosts” in the afterlife—an ancient but very real Asian superstition.
Faced with this terrifying fate, Roses summons her favorite nephew, Wayward. Believing him to possess the “lucky seed,” Roses presents Wayward with a mandatory suggestion: to father a baby boy who will inherit everything. When the other members of the Sun Clan catch wind of Roses’s plot, all hells break loose. Wayward’s family will now clash like never before in an epic war over the future of the Suns…if there is a future at all.
Yet through the chaos, Wayward sees opportunity. What if he can leverage all the conflict into a solution for his problematic family? What if he can reunite the Sun Clan by healing them? And what if the tumultuous Suns can finally learn how to love each other for the first time?
Nothing under the sun scared Roses Sun . . . but when she woke up to the silence that Sunday two weeks before the Lunar New Year, Roses was terrified.
Her entire life, the formidable matriarch of the Sun Clan of Greater Los Angeles had been as unflappable as a stone obelisk. This stony countenance was a necessity for her notorious family, consisting of a golden menagerie of people that were vastly different in appearance and personality, yet united with one shared trait: an inclination toward messiness. The eldest and hence leader of this prominent clan, it was up to Roses to be their bastion of fortitude and calm, but these were ends that often required merciless means.
Yet as spring approached, Lunar New Year loomed. This meant that Roses’s zodiac year would soon be upon her, and this reset of her astrological cycle had her uncharacteristically rattled.
Every dozen years starting from birth, each person enters their zodiac year, whether they know it or not. But it is better to know it, because the return of one’s own animal in this celestial wheel—from Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Sheep, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, to Pig—marks a transformative year in which that person will be tried and tested by fate. No, the return of one’s zodiac year is not cause for celebration, but is rather a period of consternation, inviting all sorts of energetic tumult and ghostly tomfoolery.
No one knew this better than the supremely superstitious Roses Sun. Even before the New Year, already she had begun to paint every manicured nail on her fingers and toes an imposing deep scarlet to ward away evil, ensuring that there was lucky red protection on her body at all times, even when she was naked in the shower.
Roses sat up in her California king bed, listening in alarm to the silence around her. In the dimness of her bedroom, she could see the outline of her husband, Teddy, curled up on the other end of their massive mattress. Unlike her first two husbands, Teddy the Third did not snore, but he was a night roller and often ended up on far-flung corners of their marital bed.
Roses crawled the long way over to Teddy and stirred him awake with the delicate touch of a fracking drill. “Teddy! Wake up!”
With a snort the elderly man stirred awake, holding a hand up in surrender like he did first thing every morning. He smacked his chapped lips, yawning as he felt for his glasses on the nightstand. “Morning, Rosie.”
Roses was already across the room pulling open their curtains, exposing their floor-to- ceiling window’s grand view of the Pacific Ocean shimmering at them in the early light. From his usual sleeping place at the foot of the bed, her old pit bull Houyi yawned awake, stretching luxuriously.
“This is the fourth day in a row, Teddy,” Roses said, shaking her head gravely. “The fourth day in a row where I haven’t heard the crying.”
Slowly, Teddy sat up on the bed, stretching out his stiff shoulders. Theodore “Teddy” Grinspan was the semiretired restaurateur of a classic Los Angeles delicatessen chain who was locally famous for selling fifty million rugelach over the span of his career. A gentle soul who was as sweet and self-indulgent as his pastries, he had started Ozempic at his wife’s mandatory suggestion a couple years prior and had subsequently lost nearly a hundred pounds. But still he moved laboriously and breathily, like the much bigger man he once was.
Teddy scratched his liver-spotted head. “You know, Rosie, most people would be relieved to not be hearing voices anymore.” He winced preemptively at his poor choice of words. Sure enough, as Roses strode by him into her bathroom, she rapped on his bald spot with irritated knuckles.
Sitting down at her vanity, Roses peered into the mirror and combed her voluminously long hair, naturally shiny black without a hint of gray. At fifty-nine years old, she looked easily two decades younger, aided by genetics, the occasional needling and a lifelong vampiric attitude toward UV rays. Roses’s favorite nephew, Wayward, often remarked that she resembled an “Asian Joan Crawford,” dramatic eyebrows and all. A tiny-boned woman who stood no taller than five foot one, Roses was a champion dog breeder of prized albino pit bulls that kept their entire Malibu neighborhood free of those pesky coyotes.
Very few people had ever been allowed into the palatial marble cave that was Roses’s personal bathroom, though her nonfavorite nephew, Sunbern, had once wandered in stoned and searching for wet wipes. Sunbern had been surprised instead to come upon the solitary photograph of Roses and her two younger sisters, Sunbern’s and Wayward’s mothers, atop her dresser. He had been surprised because the three Sun sisters’ relationships were, to say the least, complicated.
Hearing her husband start the shower in his own bathroom, Roses reached for the long crucifix chain that had belonged to her father, draped over the photo frame of her and her sisters. She reflexively rolled the body of the Christ between her thumb and finger a few good times, then looped the necklace around her neck. She then pulled her Sunfang phone out of her vanity drawer and dialed a number.
A live feed of house slippers housing furry toes suddenly popped up on her screen. Roses frowned and looked away. Despite her calling him nearly every morning, Master Chu rarely pointed his camera in the right direction.
Good day, Master Chu, she said in half-decent Cantonese.
A good day perhaps, Mrs. Sun, a crooning male voice replied cryptically, sounding worn as an old record. But I have tossed the coins and the divination is clear: Our good days may be numbered.
Excerpted from Lucky Seed by Justinian Huang. © 2025 by Justinian Huang, used with permission from MIRA, an imprint of HarperCollins.
