We, the Kindling

Name: We, the Kindling
Author: Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
ISBN: 9781039009288

Otoniya J. Okot Bitek

awards won

score

We, the Kindling

Otoniya J. Okot Bitek

awards won

score

#8077 of 8,085 books · #1084 in Historical Fiction

Longlisted for the Giller Prize (2025).

We, the Kindling was longlisted for the 2025 Giller Prize and was a finalist for the 2025 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. As this spare and luminous novel begins, we meet Miriam, Helen and Maggie—three friends who, years ago when they were school children, survived capture by the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda. Now, as the women go about their new lives in the city, shopping, caring for their children, planning and thinking about what the future might hold, we come to understand how deeply their past haunts the present. In graceful yet unflinching prose, Otoniya Okot Bitek weaves vivid folk tales with taut realism, revealing flashes of life before the war that ravaged Uganda, unspooling the terrible events that led to abductions of children from supposedly safe schools, and tracing perilous journeys home again. Facing endless treks across the ravaged countryside and through narrow mountain passes, gun battles and constant brutality, many girls did not survive. Those who did make it back home, some carrying small children of their own, bore the unspoken weight of their experiences within families and communities that often wished to forget and move on. In We, the Kindling, Okot Bitek insistently refuses to turn away or to spectacularize tragedy, shaping a chorus of women's voices into a hauntingly beautiful novel, suffused with care and humanity.

Buy this book at AmazonAd