WINNER OF THE 2026 TRILLIUM BOOK AWARD • FINALIST FOR THE 2025 ATWOOD GIBSON WRITERS’ TRUST FICTION PRIZE • LONGLISTED FOR THE 2025 GILLER 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

“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

“We, the Kindling is a poet’s novel in the very best way: the stark music of powerful individual voices that resonate with trauma, resilience, and tradition. This is a history of stories, insightful testimonies that insist in their frank beauty that history is not forgotten but is transmuted into the most fundamental questions, the topography of ‘a map of the places we’ve been . . . a map you won’t find on any atlas.’ Otoniya J. Okot Bitek writes with mastery of lives forged in war; a testament to the strength of these uncompromising and empowering witnesses, smouldering with life and hard-won possibility.” —2025 Atwood Gibson Prize Jury (Gary Barwin, Ali Bryan, and Jasmine Sealy)