In 1970 Kate Jennings, twenty-one, stunned a Sydney anti-war rally with a pull-no-punches speech that put ‘women’s lib’ on the map. Brave, impassioned and searing, the speech set the tone for the idiosyncratic career that was to follow. A few years later, she was on her way to New York, where she would make her name as a writer and enjoy a ringside seat at some of the most confronting events of our time.

Trouble collects Jennings’s best work from the last four decades. With a polemical anger tempered by a keen sense of the absurd and a fiercely independent streak, she writes incisively about politics, morality, finance, feminism and the writing life. She describes America with the keen eye of an outsider and looks back at Australia with an expatriate’s frankness.

Trouble is both an unconventional autobiography and a record of remarkable times. From the protest movements of the 1970s, via Wall Street’s heyday and dramatic collapse, to the historic election of Barack Obama, Jennings captures the shifts – seismic and subtle, personal and political – that brought us to where we are now. After four decades, Kate Jennings’ work is as exhilarating and impossible to categorise – shocking with the shock of recognition – as the day it was written.