Nigerian author and PhD student Tochi Eze is set to publish an enthralling Nigerian family saga as her debut novel. Titled This Kind of Trouble, the novel will be published by Penguin Random House imprints – Tiny Reparations Books (U.S.) and McClelland & Stewart (Canada).

The rights were also sold to #Merky Books in the UK. Eze’s novel is described by Publisher’s Marketplace as a “century-spanning family saga in which a long-estranged couple with ties to the same Nigerian village are reluctantly reunited by their daughter.”

However, this sweet tale of reunion is shadowed by generational trauma, colonial intrusion, and the haunting effects of ancestral sins. More specifically, the novel explores the ways mental trauma is culturally expressed through the language of curses and consequence.

Based on the description, the novel sounds like a complex addition to the genre of domestic fiction. We are especially interested to see how Eze navigates the territory of familial trauma. In her bio, Eze says she is a writer and survivor of family violence, so it will be fascinating to see her take up these personal and academic concerns from a fictional perspective.

Tochi Eze is a Nigerian writer, lawyer, and PhD student. After several years working in corporate Nigeria, she acquired an MFA in Creative Writing and is currently pursuing her doctoral studies with a focus on the socio-legal encounters of Black transnational identities. She has published stories in The Southampton Review and Catapult.

Congrats to Eze on her debut novel!