We, the Kindling: A Novel

One of CBC's Canadian Books to Read in 2025

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.

OTONIYA JULIANE OKOT BITEK writes poetry and fiction. Her first collection, 100 Days, won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her second collection, A is for Acholi, won the 2023 Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her most recent collection of poetry, Song & Dread, is published by Talonbooks. Otoniya was born in Kenya to Ugandan parents and has lived in Canada for more than three decades. Her short story “Going Home” received a special mention in the 2004 Commonwealth Short Fiction Prize. We, the Kindling is her first novel.

ISBN: 9781039009288
Format: Hardback
Pages: 224
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: February 04, 2025

“There is so much care in the way Bitek alchemizes living memory. It’s folk tale, documentary and precise prose woven into a transformative novel.” —Valérie Bah, author of Subterrane

"There is a great sense of care and attention, coupled with an astonishing expansiveness radiating from Otoniya J. Okot Bitek’s writing in We, the Kindling. Love is felt throughout the book, even as the characters experience devastating violence and hatred. This love, this care, and the author’s exquisite, precise, uncompromising and deeply evocative language carries us forward as readers—I could not put the book down. This novel breathes, undulates and shapeshifts in a way that allows us not only to embrace the characters’ thoughts and stories, but to move with them. We, the Kindling accomplishes what I think is one of the most important feats of literature: it makes it possible to look at the unthinkable and really see it, feel it, in the same way a pinhole box allows us to look at a solar eclipse." —Catherine Leroux, Canada Reads-winning author of The Future and Giller-shortlisted author of The Party Wall

“We, the Kindling is an extraordinary accomplishment, a novel of voices liberating themselves from horror but equally from spectacle and instrumentalization, voices freed from conventional narration so that we may sense, in their spare beauty and insistent aliveness, that which might yet emerge from catastrophe. Only a writer with the exquisite talents and sensitivities of Otoniya Okot Bitek could make such bold and essential art.” —David Chariandy, author of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize-winning Brother and I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You

“We, The Kindling is one of those rare, clear-eyed and profound stories that pierces straight through the marrow and the heart. It is an astonishing, uncompromising novel about the vulnerability of children and the cruelty of those with unmitigated power. And because it rings so loud with truth, it alters who we are and how we understand the world. A visionary telling that will be passed down for generations. If ever there was a ‘must read’ novel, this is it.” —Lisa Moore, author of Open, February, Caught, and the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize-shortlisted Invisible Prisons