‘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.