There's Going to Be Trouble
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A woman is pulled into a love affair with a radical activist, unknowingly echoing her family’s dangerous past and risking the foundations of her future in this electrifying novel.
“An exhilarating novel of star-crossed romances and radical politics, with writing so evocative I swear I could smell the tear gas.”—Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix and Wellness
Minnow has always tried to lead the life her single father modeled—private, quiet, hardworking, apolitical. So she is rocked when an instinctive decision to help a student makes her the notorious public face of a scandal in the small town where she teaches. As tensions rise, death threats follow, and an overwhelmed Minnow flees to a teaching position in Paris. There, she falls into an exhilarating and all-consuming relationship with Charles, a young Frenchman whose activism has placed him at odds with his powerful family. As Minnow is pulled in to the daring protest Charles and his friends are planning, she unknowingly almost repeats a secret tragedy from her family’s past. Her father wasn’t always the restrained, conservative man he appears today. There are things he has taken great pains to conceal from his family and from the world.
In 1968, Keen is avoiding the Vietnam draft by pursuing a PhD at Harvard. He lives his life in the basement chemistry lab, studiously ignoring the news. But when he unexpectedly falls in love with Olya, a fiery community organizer, he is consumed by her world and loses sight of his own. Learning that his deferment has ended and he’s been drafted, Keen agrees to participate in the latest action that Olya is leading—one with more dangerous and far-reaching consequences than he could have imagined.
Minnow’s and Keen’s intertwining stories take us through the turmoil of the late sixties student movements and into the chaos of the modern world. Exploding with suspense, heart, and intelligence, There’s Going to Be Trouble is a story about revolution, legacy, passionate love, and how we live with the consequences of our darkest secrets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The incisive if somewhat overstuffed latest from Silverman (We Play Ourselves) fuses two disparate narratives of contemporary Paris and 1960s Harvard with themes of protest and romance. In 2018, Minerva "Minnow" Hunter is fired from her high school teaching job in a tight-knit, conservative town, somewhere in the U.S., for reasons that are gradually revealed. She then moves to Paris, where she takes up a position in the English department of an unnamed university and falls in with the gilets jaunes protest movement against president Emmanuel Macron's elitist policies. In a parallel narrative set in 1968, a grad student named Keen works at Harvard in a lab that makes napalm for U.S. forces in Vietnam. Each day, he and his colleagues listen to the shouts of protesters from outside their door. His eventual decision to join the protestors results in violent consequences. Silverman takes a lot on, and not all of it sticks. (The formulaic romance between Minnow and a French protester is a particular letdown: "The curve of his shoulder. The jut of his jaw.... She imagined him naked"). Still, Silverman manages to build suspense as they gradually connect the dots between the parallel stories. There's plenty of intrigue bubbling beneath the surface of this surprisingly complex novel.