In his resolutely unsentimental portraits of African--American life, acclaimed novelist Jervey Tervalon refuses to sacrifice the integrity of the story at hand for any thematic concerns or politically tidy solutions. "Great literature has no agenda; it's not propaganda," notes The Washington Post Book World. "Tervalon offers no solutions.He portrays people who live in a certain world at a certain time and do the best they can." Now, on the heels of the prize-winning Understand This and the bestselling Dead Above Ground, Tervalon delivers his most ambitious and accomplished novel yet, an impassioned, searching story of contemporary love. In All the Trouble You Need, Jordan is a young professor on the West Coast who feels increasingly untethered, equally torn between his sense of disconnection from his heritage and his desire to inhabit a broader world--one that isn't defined by his race and class background. He pursues this elusive world by beginning an affair with one of his students, a wealthy biracial woman from Santa Barbara named Daphne. Meanwhile, Sophia, a beautiful young innocent African-American woman also from Santa Barbara who has fallen in love with him, surprisingly challenges him to re-evaluate his life and values.

As this unconventional triangle shifts and redefines itself in unexpected ways, Jervey Tervalon offers a complex pageant of race and romance, full of pungent dialogue and sharp, boundary-crossing characters.