People in Trouble
  • Published: 17 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9781529111361
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $29.99

People in Trouble

Formats & editions
EBook
5 Sep 2019
Paperback
17 Sep 2019
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First published in 1990, this is a blistering novel about a love triangle in AIDS-era New York

'A book of resistance and love, as urgently necessary now as it was thirty years ago' Olivia Laing

First published in 1990, discover this blistering novel about a love triangle in New York during the AIDS crisis. The perfect novel to read after bingeing It's A Sin.

It was the beginning of the end of the world but not everyone noticed right away.

It is the late 1980s. Kate, an ambitious artist, lives in Manhattan with her husband Peter. She's having an affair with Molly, a younger lesbian who works part-time in a movie theater.

At one of many funerals during an unbearably hot summer, Molly becomes involved with a guerrilla activist group fighting for people with AIDS. But Kate is more cautious, and Peter is bewildered by the changes he's seeing in his city and, most crucially, in his wife.

Soon the trio learn how tragedy warps even the closest relationships, and that anger - and its absence - can make the difference between life and death.

'Strong, nervy and challenging' New York Times
  • Published: 17 September 2019
  • ISBN: 9781529111361
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 288
  • RRP: $29.99
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About the author

Sarah Schulman

Sarah Schulman is a novelist, nonfiction writer, playwright, screenwriter and AIDS historian. She is the author of 19 books. Her awards include a Guggenheim in Playwrighting and a Fulbright in Judaic Studies. With Jim Hubbard she is co-founder of MIX: NYC Queer Experimental Film Festival, The ACT UP Oral History Project (www.actuporalhistory.org) and co-producer of the film UNITED IN ANGER: A History of ACT UP. Sarah is on the advisory board of Jewish Voice for Peace, and is faculty advisor to Students for Justice In Palestine at The College of Staten Island where she is a Distinguished Professor.

portrait photo of Sarah Schulman

Praise for People in Trouble

The questions that the novel stages about action, complicity, and discomfort are evergreen, but they resonate with particular force for any American trying to figure out their relationship to Trump and Trumpism now

Peter C. Baker, The New Yorker

A witty, angry and anguished novel

Publishers Weekly

This is the first work of fiction I've read about AIDS that portrays the enormous activist response the epidemic has generated...Schulman's people are fighters...terrifically inspiring examples of the human spirit's passion for revival

David Leavitt

Startlingly powerful

Dorothy Allison

This emotional book won't make the walls of repression crumble, but it might make you understand this painful, hopeful moment better

The Village Voice

Strong, nervy and challenging

The New York Times

A scathing and darkly hilarious apocalypse-now

The Nation

Sarah Schulman is a brilliant visionary, and this is a book of resistance and love, as urgently necessary now as it was thirty years ago

Olivia Laing