A politically astute coming-of-age novel set in Guyana in the turbulent late 1970s, where Kipling Plass and his teenage friends struggle for physical and emotional survival as they contend with the colonial past, racial animosity and Guyana's economic hardships. Heartbreaking, shocking, and lyrical.

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.