LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 GILLER PRIZE • FINALIST FOR THE 2025 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE • Globe and Mail’s Best Books of 2025 • CBC’s Best Canadian Fiction of 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

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.