"an outstanding addition to contemporary Guyanese literature"
...an outstanding addition to contemporary Guyanese literature.
This is a novel of extraordinary qualities...
...Here is a new work that takes its place among a long and noble line of fiction about growing up in the West Indies, but brings a fresh, novel, different approach to the genre through its narrative style, the potency and sting of its language and dramatisation; its characterisation of and rootedness in the biography of a community.
Semple’s prose is risk taking and unafraid in its dramatisation of village life, family bonds and conflicts, sex scandals, domestic issues, love and crime. This is further fuelled by suspense and mystery as in the continuing unfolding story of murdered fishermen.
Yet, harsh social realism coexists with the exquisiteness of poetic treatment in illustrious language of sensitivity to the beauty of a landscape and natural environment, philosophical thoughts and passages of existentialism, questioning, pathos and sadness. This is rendered in often engaging, deep poetic prose...
...Semple succeeds in dramatising the saving graces in a rural society of fallible humanity.
...It is hard to resist the powerful language, the painting of a multitude of characters and the humour...
...With Kipling Plass (2024), Peepal Tree Press has once again released an important work of fiction in Guyanese literature. Semple joined the front ranks of Guyanese poetry when he won the Guyana Prize with The Lamplight Teller, (2004) repeating the glory with Flight and Other Poems (2022), a collection containing many retrospective flashbacks to experiences in an earlier Guyanese society. This novel cements that place and stands out as a momentous contribution to Guyanese literature.
