A spare, luminous novel centred around the unforgettable voices of schoolgirls in Uganda who survive capture by the Lord's Resistance Army.

In northern Uganda in the 1990s, girls as young as eleven were abducted from schools and homes by the Lord’s Resistance Army and thrust into the ravages of war. Facing endless treks, gun battles, and unwanted underage marriages while forced to be pawns in political machinations they did not understand, many did not survive. Those who did make it through now bear the physical and psychological weight of these experiences—often within communities that wish only to forget or ignore them.

As We, the Kindling begins, we meet Miriam, Helen, and Maggie, three survivors now in their late-twenties who are haunted by their teenage years spent in forced servitude to their captors. In graceful yet unflinching prose the novel weaves past with present, layering lively folk tales with taut realism to reveal the rhythm of the girls’ lives before the war, unspooling the circumstances of their abductions, and tracing their perilous journeys home again. Reminiscent of The Buddha in the Attic, this is an extraordinary, starkly beautiful novel, full of care and humanity, that insistently refuses to spectacularize brutality and tragedy.

Otoniya J. Okot Bitek is a poet and scholar. Her collection of poetry, 100 Days (University of Alberta 2016), was nominated for several writing prizes including the 2017 BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the 2017 Alberta Book Awards and the 2017 Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the 2017 IndieFab Book of the Year Award for poetry and the 2017 Glenna Lushei Prize for African Poetry. From the fall of 2020 to the spring of 2021, Otoniya had the privileged positions of being the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence, and one of the SFU Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellows. She has recently moved to Kingston, Ontario, to live on the traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe people. Otoniya is an assistant professor of Black Creativity in Queen's University, Kingston.

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