Kipling Plass

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.

Berkley Wendell Semple was born in Guyana. He has published four collections of poetry, and his poetry and fiction have appeared in Callaloo, The Hampden-Sydney Review, The Caribbean Writer, and many other publications. He is a veteran of the US armed forces and a graduate of the Naval School of Health Sciences. He holds an MA and MLS degrees from (CUNY) and an MPhil from Long Island University (LIU) where he is a current Ph.D. candidate. Berkley Wendell Semple is a librarian and currently works for the Queens Public Library system in New York City.