There's Going to Be Trouble: A Novel

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.

Jen Silverman (they/them) is a New York-based writer, playwright, and screenwriter. Silverman is the author of the novels There’s Going to Be Trouble and We Play Ourselves, which was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award, the story collection The Island Dwellers, which was longlisted for a PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for debut fiction, and the poetry chapbook Bath, selected by Traci Brimhall for Driftwood Press. Additional work has appeared in The New York Times, Vogue, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. Their plays have been produced across the United States and internationally, including The Roommate, starring Patti LuPone and Mia Farrow, on Broadway. Silverman has written on Tales of the City (Netflix) and is a writer-producer on Tokyo Vice Season 2 (Max). They are a three-time MacDowell Fellow, a member of New Dramatists, a Scholar of Note at the American Library in Paris, and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim.