Looking for Trouble - by Colleen Higgs (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

You could breathe in Yeoville. Set in vibrant, edgy Yeoville during late 1980s, early 1990s Johannesburg, the stories in Looking for Trouble capture a moment when everything in South Africa was about to change. Colleen Higgs presents love stories without sentiment, relationships explored through the small, broken things that reveal everything. In "Plumbing: A Short History," a woman recounts her relationships through the metaphor of the dripping faucet that all the men in her life tried to fix. In "Looking for Trouble," the collection's signature story, a woman recounts the unraveling of her situationship that ultimately leads to violence and to her question about how she arrived there. These intimate portraits explore the complexities of urban life in a grey area, both literally and figuratively, where filmmakers, musicians, and activists mingle in flats with faulty plumbing and hearts full of longing. With sharp wit and brutal honesty, Higgs reveals the gap between how we imagine our lives and how we actually live them. In a time and place where everyone you sleep with has slept with someone you know, these stories examine the particular intensity of being young when the personal and political intersect. Looking for Trouble is both a love letter to a vanished Johannesburg and a clear-eyed examination of being human.

Review Quotes

"These wry, subtle stories are deceptively simple, completely compelling. Brave, evocative writing that takes you back to the intense milieu of 80s Yeoville, and to all the bittersweet sexual questing of youth".-- Henrietta Rose-Innes (Author of Shark's Egg, Homing, Nineveh, and a Caine Prize Winner)

"Looking for Trouble is one the most surprising books that I have read in a long time. A greatly sophisticated balance of simplicity and confidence emanates from each short story, as well as out of the collection as a whole... The success of this collection lies in the fact that it is simultaneously specific and transcendental; it moves beyond the historical specificity of a defined moment and confronts situations which are still of political importance." -- Christell Stander, Rapport

"These stories awakened in me a sense of nostalgia, not only for Yeoville in the early nineties, but for being young, love's fool and sexually reckless. At some point, experience forces us to lose our illusions and come of age, damaged by love but wiser. This spot-on collection captures that arc of life and, as I turned the last page, I felt we had lived well, if imperfectly." -- Rachel Zadok (Author of Gem Squash Tokoloshe)

"Looking for Trouble is a book that will make you late for work. Like an unexpected fist in the stomach. Words that will stay with you long after you turned the last page." -- Melinda Ferguson (Author of Smacked and Hooked)

About the Author

As well as being a writer, Colleen Higgs is also a publisher, she started the ground-breaking independent southern African women's press, Modjaji Books in 2007. She lives in Cape Town with her daughter and a cat. Looking for Trouble is her first collection of short stories. She also has two collections of poetry Lava Lamp Poems (2011) and Halfborn Woman (2004) all published by Hands-On Books. She was recognised for her work in publishing by the Mail and Guardian, and was featured in their Book of Women 2011 in the Arts & Culture category.