March 29: We, The Kindling by Otoniya J. Okot Bitek
March 29, Saturday (online)
12pm New York | 5pm London | 8pm Kampala
We will read We, the Kindling, the debut novel by acclaimed poet Otoniya J. Okot Bitek. We are very excited that author will join us at the book club and the conversation will be hosted by Bhakti Shringarpure.
You can buy the book on the Penguin Books website here.
About the book
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 J. Okot Bitek is an award winning poet and writer. 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.
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