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We, the kindling  Cover Image Book Book

We, the kindling / Otoniya J. Okot Bitek.

Summary:

"A concise, searing 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 horrors of war. Facing long, perilous treks, gun battles, and underage marriages, while forced to be pawns in political machinations they did not understand, many did not survive. Those who did make it through continue to bear the physical and psychological weight of these terrors. As We, the Kindling begins, we meet Miriam and Helen, two survivors who are now in their twenties but haunted by their years in forced servitude to the Army. In spare, graceful, yet unflinching prose the novel weaves past with present, layering 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 harrowing journeys home again. Reminiscent of The Buddha in the Attic, this is a luminous novel, full of life and care, that insistently refuses to spectacularize brutality and tragedy."-- Provided by publisher.

Record details

  • ISBN: 9781039009288 (hardcover)
  • Physical Description: 210 pages ; 22 cm
  • Publisher: Toronto, ON : Alchemy, by Knopf Canada, 2025.
Subject: Lord's Resistance Army > Fiction.
Abduction > Fiction.
Slavery > Africa > Fiction.
Survival > Fiction.
Young women > Fiction.
Uganda > Fiction.
Genre: Psychological fiction.
Novels.

Available copies

  • 1 of 1 copy available at Tsuga Consortium. (Show)
  • 1 of 1 copy available at Innisfil Public Library System. (Show)
  • 1 of 1 copy available at Lakeshore Branch.

Holds

  • 0 current holds with 1 total copy.
Show Only Available Copies
Location Call Number / Copy Notes Barcode Shelving Location Status Due Date
Lakeshore Branch FIC Okot 31681010405215 FICTION Available -

OTONIYA JULIANE OKOT BITEK is an Acholi poet. Her most recent book, A is for Acholi (Wolsak and Wynn, 2022), was shortlisted for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Her previous collection, 100 Days (University of Alberta Press, 2016),  reflected on the meaning of memory two decades after the Rwanda genocide and was nominated for the BC Book Prize, the Pat Lowther Award, the Alberta Book Award, and the Canadian Authors Award for Poetry. It won the IndieFab Book of the Year Award for Poetry and the Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Otoniya has been a Poetry Ambassador for the City of Vancouver, and in the fall of 2020 was the Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence in the English Department at Simon Fraser University. She was also a Jack and Doris Shadbolt Fellow in the spring of 2021. She is currently an assistant professor of Black Creativity at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario.


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