by Berkley Wendell Semple (Author)
Moving, shocking, lyrical and sometimes grimly funny, Kipling Plass must survive as teenager abandoned by his mother after her mental breakdown. Set in a multiracial Guyanese village in the 1980s, at the height of that country's economic collapse, as social structures give way, the novel confronts the tensions between social solidarity and dog-eat-dog individualistic ruthlessness. Amid this, Kipling Plass narrates his and his teenage friends' struggles for both physical and emotional survival, amidst their own confusions of sexual and social identity. A heartbreaking story of family trauma, sexuality, friendship and growing up, Kipling Plass is an epic portrayal of 1980s Guyana that is rarely seen in fiction.