WINNER, GUYANA PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2025 • LONGLISTED, CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION 2025 • FINALIST, 2024 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARD • CBC BOOKS BEST CANADIAN FICTION OF 2024
“Time-bending, world-bending, heart-bending, Naniki is truly luminous … a lyrical spiritual Afro-Indigenous epic set in a climate ravaged Caribbean… two elemental beings, Amana and Skelele, must find their way across the present and the past if the world is to have a future. Kempadoo has outdone herself: this is what happens when a book becomes a spell.” — Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
“A piece of speculative climate fiction, Naniki is a love letter to the Caribbean and its light-flecked waters. Despite its critical content, it is playful, refreshing, and luminous, inspiring an almost childlike curiosity and urge for exploration, while illustrating the importance of understanding our past to safeguard our future.” Val Rigwma, Montreal Review of Books feature: Myth Conception
“This work is wonderful, brilliant, surreal and unlike anything I’ve read before in Caribbean Lit. Its plot has utopian and dystopian elements merging into each other, most times, without acknowledging differentiation. The work is a fable, a parable, and a mythic tale, spun together into a movement of sound and colour and form, but underpinned by abstraction, metaphor and a radical philosophy of being. A merging of land, sea and air into being that then creates a harmony where love exists on so many planes simultaneously that physical contact may or may not happen and/or it is happening all the time. Layer upon layer of ambiguity that transcends limitations because there is unspoken agreement about all things being possible.” Ramabai Espinet, author of The Swinging Bridge
“Kempadoo’s engagement with Caribbean lore and mythology is spellbinding, magical, and wonderfully lyrical.” Don Winkler, Governor General Award-winning literary translator
“The origins and ancestry of a people are almost always tied closely to their relationship with the lands and waters around them, where they make their lives and leave traces of themselves for future generations to find and follow. Sometimes these traces can thin and fade, and it is the work of authors and artists like Oonya Kempadoo that bring them back into bold relief.” Open-Book.ca: Oonya Kempadoo Explores the Deep Blue of the Caribbean in Naniki (interview)
Dragonfly.eco World Fiction Spotlight (interview)
All Decent Animals
“How am I only now finding out about this writer? It’s as if she’s inventing her own language, which is incantatory, dense, and lush. The authority and blood pulse of it seduced me.” Karen Russell, Oprah’s Summer Reading List
“Guyanese-British Kempadoo’s third novel again takes on the socioeconomic complexity of the Caribbean, this time in Trinidad …” Kirkus Review
“Over the last 15 years, Kempadoo has established herself as a preeminent writer of Caribbean fiction . . . ” Diego Báez, Booklist.
“Set amid the distinct rhythms of Port of Spain, Trinidad, Kempadoo’s multifaceted and multicultural cast of characters confront the inevitable while Carnival, in all its music and madness, plays on. Friends gather to protect and cherish one of their own and learn about themselves through all the island’s capacity for humor, complexity and the love of living.” Washington Independent Review of Books (Interview)
Tide Running
“Kempadoo is extraordinary . . . Her powerful novel about an ill-starred ménage â trios—set as it is against a backdrop of devastating natural beauty and overwhelming material poverty, and written with an incantatory lyricism—represents one of the finest attempts to come to terms with the emotional fault lines and historical complexities of contemporary Caribbean society. . . Kempadoo breaks old stories, makes them anew.” Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of This Is How You Lose Her
“With a finely tuned ear for the cadences of the Caribbean . . . Kempadoo succeeds in turning an unsettling tale into an exploration of the global politics of desire.” The New Yorker
“As with Buxton Spice, . . . what makes Tide Running really extraordinary is its style. Kempadoo draws her characters and settings with such vivid strokes that her language leaps off the page.” Jerome Boyd Maunsell, The Times (London)
“Oonya Kempadoo is a lyrical poet hiding in a novelist’s form. Tide Running puts most other books to shame with its illustrative details and inventive language. This story is the war of two worlds. The kind of writing you want to tell your friends about. Smart, powerful, and a real pleasure.” Victor LaValle, author of The Devil in Silver
“Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide Running is effective, beautiful, and haunting . . . and pulses with a distinctive Caribbean rhythm.” Glenville Lovell, Washington Post
“Tide Running is a decided leap forward, a tour-de-force of imagination in its inhabiting of the souls of the islands’ marginalized and dispossessed young men, it shares with its predecessor a fascination with the permutations of a spoken language.” The Los Angeles Times
“A vividly imagined [tale] by this poetically gifted, politically incisive young Caribbean writer.” — Elle magazine
Buxton Spice
“A brilliant achievement, precise, moving, poetic . . . as much a political novel as one about childhood.” The Independent (UK)
‘Rich . . . kaleidoscopic . . . superb and superbly written.’ The New York Times Book Review
‘Her sentences are her own, lending a lucid immediacy to activities described with sensuous relish, from eating green mango chow: “tongues hanging out and noses running from blazing pepper, lips purple with vinegar”, to leaping from a tree: “Landing – knees snapping, palms slapping the ground” The Caribbean’s own Booker winner?‘ The Guardian (UK)
“Kempadoo is outstanding . . . Her observations true and funny . . . the prose is moist, natural, raucously alive, each sentence fantastically rhythmic and right.” Mail on Sunday (UK)
‘Oonya Kempadoo has written a sexy, stirring, richly poetic semi-autobiographical first novel.’ The Wall Street Journal
‘As juicy and ripe as the fruits drooping from the Buxton Spice Mango tree . . . Kempadoo’s Caribbean argot is precise and fluid, enriching this debut with bawdiness, violence and raucous humor.’ Los Angeles Times
“Lushly exotic . . . viewed through the eyes of Lula, a pre-pubescent Lolita growing up in Guyana, the novel draws an impressionistic picture of life in a country on the verge of collapse . . . Passages of descriptive brilliance . . . Swells the sexual lexicon and describes with erotic effect a child’s sexual awakening.” The Times (London)
‘An exuberant, thrilling book.” Evening Standard (London)
Kempadoo’s prose is, like Arundhati Roy’s, peppered with the compound words of the vernacular, adding further richness and texture to a narrative already bursting with detail’ Observer (UK)
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