This Kind of Trouble

'Where are the fragments of the life you have lived?'
2005
In Atlanta, Benjamin, a white-passing man of Nigerian heritage, is wondering what his life has been made up of, broken relationships, attempts to forge an identity from others' memories.
In Lagos, Margaret, a Nigerian single mother, is trying to decipher and finally destroy the mental malaise that has troubled her for as long as she can remember, by winding her way through a complex family history.
Though they are no longer the twenty-somethings they once were when they met, and the 40 years that have passed since they last saw one another might suggest they are strangers, there is a deep and unsettling history that has bound them together since long before they were born.
1905
A well-respected chief in Umumilo village, Nigeria, Okolo has always followed tradition. Then three of the young village women - including his sister, who follows the white man's God - are shrouded in scandal, and Okolo is forced to choose which path to take: that of least resistance, embracing the ways of the white man to save his village and his sister's pride, or the other, preserving the ways that have sustained generations - but at what cost?
A beautifully crafted multi-generational story of family history and identity, This Kind of Trouble is a powerful debut that asks what makes up a life, and how when it's broken, we might put it together again.

Tochi Eze is a writer and lawyer from Nigeria. Longreads named her short story "The Americanization of Kambili," published by Catapult, as one of "Ten Outstanding Stories to Read in 2023." She has an MFA from Florida Atlantic University and is currently a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Virginia. THIS KIND OF TROUBLE is her first novel.