Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Family Saga
Author: Tochi Eze
Year published: 2025
TWs: Mental illness, violence, death, family estrangement, schizophrenia
Rating: 3.5/5
I picked up ‘This Kind of Trouble’ knowing very little about it, and ended up completely absorbed. Tochi Eze’s debut novel is the kind of book that starts out feeling like a love story and slowly reveals itself to be something much bigger and more layered than that: i’s a multigenerational family saga spanning a century and two continents.
Published in August 2025, it’s already been getting a lot of attention, with the New York Times calling it a sweeping story of colonialism and its aftershocks. Having now read it, I’d say that’s exactly right.
‘A man should be entitled to the troubles of his making; no more, no less.’
Synopsis (always spoiler-free)
In 1960s Lagos, a city buzzing with the energy of Nigeria’s newfound independence, Margaret Okolo meets Benjamin Fletcher, a British-born man of mixed Nigerian heritage who has come to Lagos in search of a connection to his roots following the death of his half-Nigerian father. Despite Margaret’s reservations, their pull toward each other is immediate. They fall in love, exchanging childhood stories over lazy work lunches and slowly uncovering a shared past far more interconnected than either of them could have anticipated.
However, their marriage is forbidden by the elders of Margaret’s village, Umumilo, for reasons that neither Margaret nor the reader fully understands until much later. Margaret begins to believe she has been cursed for going against her clan’s wishes, while her mental health sets the begins to deteriorate.
By 2005, the two are long estranged. Margaret has retired to a gated community in Lagos. Benjamin is living alone in Atlanta, managing a heart condition and unable to name a single next of kin. When their grandson Chuka starts showing signs that echo Margaret’s own struggles, the former lovers are forced to reunite and finally confront the buried secrets they’d spent decades running from.
‘With the gravity of something ancient and the insight of something very contemporary.’
My Thoughts
What I kept coming back to with this novel is how cleverly Eze structures time. The three timelines, Umumilo at the turn of the twentieth century, Lagos in the 1960s, and Atlanta and Lagos in 2005, don’t just run parallel to each other. They speak and feed into each other. An event in 1905 sends tremors forward through 1965 and into 2005 in ways that feel inevitable rather than orchestrated, and there’s something genuinely satisfying about watching the full story slowly come together.
The chapters set in Umumilo in the early 1900s are particularly special. They have this almost fable-like, hypnotic quality that’s quite different from the rest of the novel. Eze uses them to show the original moment the fracture in this family first happened, tracing it all the way forward through generations. I understand why some readers may find those sections a little confusing at first, but the prose makes it easy to push through.
The forbidden love story between Margaret and Benjamin is the heart of the novel and earns its place there. What I really appreciated is that Eze doesn’t make their relationship simply tragic or simply romantic. It’s both, and it’s also messy and complicated. The racial and cultural dynamics of their relationship in 1960s Lagos are handled with a lot of nuance. Eze is interested not just in whether they love each other, but in what that love costs.
The colonial history backdrop is where the novel really distinguishes itself. Eze shows us how British colonialism didn’t just reshape political structures but burrowed into family dynamics and communities. The contrast between the Western understanding of mental illness and the ancestral, spiritual language of curses is handled thoughtfully throughout the novel. Whether what Margaret experiences is illness or inheritance or both is left productively open, and that ambiguity makes the novel even more intriguing.
My one complaint is about the pacing. The novel takes its time, sometimes just a little slowly. There are stretches, particularly in the middle, where the momentum dips but with Eze’s beautiful writing style I couldn’t really complain.
If you’re a fan of multigenerational sagas, Nigerian literature, or fiction that takes colonial history seriously without ever turning into a lecture, this is novel is definitely worth your time.
Happy Reading!
About the Author
Tochi Eze is a writer and lawyer from Nigeria. She holds an MFA from Florida Atlantic University and is currently a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Virginia.
Her short story ‘The Americanization of Kambili’, published by Catapult, was named one of Longreads’ ten outstanding stories of 2023. ‘This Kind of Trouble’ is her debut novel.
Find more on her website!
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