Author Interview: Next Time Will Be Our Turn by Jesse Q. Sutanto

Jesse Q. Sutanto is best known for the laugh-out-loud hijinks of the Aunties series and Vera Wong’s Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, but her newest novel, Next Time Will Be Our Turn, takes a quieter, more intimate approach. Blending queer longing, grief, and generational silence with Jesse’s signature sharpness, the story explores family truths that can’t be solved with a scheme or a punchline. In our conversation, Jesse reflects on writing from a deeply personal place, navigating the weight of patriarchal norms, and finding the humor that still lives alongside heartbreak. Check out our interview below and pick up Next Time Will Be Our Turn, out November 11th!

Next Time Will Be Our Turn

by Jesse Q. Sutanto
Published by: Berkley
on November 11, 2025
Genres: Adult, Contemporary, LGBTQIA+
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A grandmother tells her granddaughter about her twisty, often surprising, journey to who she is now in this sweeping love story by USA Today bestselling author Jesse Q. Sutanto.

Izzy Chen is dreading her family’s annual Chinese New Year celebration, where they all come together at a Michelin-starred restaurant to flaunt their status and successes in hopes to one up each other. So when her seventy-three-year-old glamorous and formidable grandmother walks in with a stunning woman on her arm and kisses her in front of everyone, it shakes Izzy to her core. She’d always considered herself the black sheep of the family for harboring similar feelings to the ones her Nainai just displayed.

Seeing herself in her teenage granddaughter's struggles with identity and acceptance, Magnolia Chen tells Izzy her own story, of how as a teen she was sent by her Indo-Chinese parents from Jakarta to Los Angeles for her education and fell in love with someone completely forbidden to her by both culture and gender norms—Ellery, an American college student who became Magnolia's best friend and the love of her life. Stretching across decades and continents, Magnolia's star-crossed love story reveals how life can take unexpected turns but ultimately lead you to exactly who you're meant to be.

Author Interview

Your Aunties series and Vera Wong are so beloved for their madcap schemes and found-family chaos. In this one, you’re exploring a more hushed, secret kind of family truth. Did writing this quieter heartbreak feel like you were rebelling against your own signature style, or is it all part of the same vibe for you?

It was definitely more challenging to write, because I couldn’t rely on the high stakes that come with a murder story, nor could I rely on humor to get the reader entertained enough to turn the page. But I don’t see it as a rebellion against my own signature style, since I think we are all made of many different facets, and this is just one of mine. It felt very natural to write, probably because the story is so personal and there are a lot of things in there that I’ve been dying to write about, like the purity culture and traditional patriarchal norms in the Chinese-Indo community, because I have struggled against them for decades. It felt like a scream I have been holding in, and it was a relief to finally have an outlet for it.

In your mysteries, your characters often bend the rules to protect the ones they love, but in this story, Izzy and Magnolia are up against rules that feel so much bigger: culture, time, generational silence. How did you navigate that tension between small acts of defiance and the weight of history?

Great question. It’s a question that makes me sad to ponder, actually, because to be very honest, personally, I have been making small acts of defiance since I came to realize how my entire life had been shaped to conform to the patriarchal society, but none of those small acts did anything until I gained financial independence. So when I wrote this, I showed how helpless Magnolia felt once she graduated college and moved back to Indonesia. Like me, Magnolia was full of a fire that longed to burn down patriarchal norms, but without financial independence, there was only so much she could do. The weight of history, of making sure that women are always financially dependent on men, is too oppressive. But then we have Magnolia receiving help from another woman (I won’t mention her name so as to avoid spoilers), which in turn allows Magnolia to start her own career, which changes the course of her entire life. And none of it would have happened without small acts of defiance adding up to become a big thing that gains momentum over time. So even in the face of hopelessness, I wanted to show that every little step counts, especially when women help women.

Your books are famously laugh out loud funny, even when dead bodies are involved! This time, you’re blending queer longing and grief with humor in a more delicate balance. Was there a moment in Izzy or Magnolia’s story where you surprised yourself, where a line made you both ache and laugh?

A lot of Izzy and Magnolia’s interaction made me pause because it was both funny and yet sad. Like when Izzy got angry at Magnolia for having a girlfriend in her seventies, and Magnolia said something along the lines of, “Oh my, lots of rules for seventy-year-old women” and Izzy said, “No more than there are rules for sixteen-year-old girls.” It hit me how true that is, even now. That we are always beholden to these rules of what a girl or a woman should be like, how she should dress, and how she should behave. It made me so happy to write these scenes where Magnolia urges Izzy to face up to these rules and–well, basically tell them to eff off.