{"product_id":"we-inherit-the-fire-isbn-9780771019852","title":"We Inherit the Fire","description":"\u003cb\u003eOne of \u003ci\u003eMs.\u003c\/i\u003e Magazine’s Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA gorgeously rendered, unflinching portrait of the fractured relationship between a mother and her daughter—set against the tumultuous end of apartheid in South Africa.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThere is that photograph, of course. My mother: standing in front of a soldier, closer than anyone else would dare . . . \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn late-1980s South Africa, teenager Kelelo is forced to leave her mountain school for a newly desegregated school in town, where her identity as the daughter of celebrated freedom fighter Kewame “Dolly” Malaka makes her an instant curiosity. While her classmates see her as a symbol of progress, at home she struggles with a mother who is emotionally unreachable, still haunted by the violence and deprivation she endured as a political prisoner under apartheid.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eKewame, now living in material comfort, hides a growing inner collapse as memories of prison life and the women who sustained her resurface, stirred by her grandmother’s illness and the pressure of maintaining a façade of perfection. As mother and daughter navigate a shifting political landscape, \u003ci\u003eWe Inherit the Fire\u003c\/i\u003e interlaces their voices to reveal the unspoken wounds, buried histories, and complex inheritance of resilience, pain, and responsibility that bind and divide generations of Black South African women.\u003cb\u003eOne of \u003ci\u003eMs.\u003c\/i\u003e Magazine’s Most Anticipated Feminist Books of 2026\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Incisive. . . . The story builds to an insightful depiction of the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics. As Kewame reflects, ‘We love like this, the women in this family: with tenderness and fury.’ This will move readers.” \u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Kagiso Lesego Molope writes with striking precision and intelligence, crafting prose that moves like poetry while speaking directly to the heart. This novel of the bonds and betrayals between mothers and daughters and the scars of a changing country sparks like a flame: dangerous and beautiful. Deftly weaving the less told stories of young women and the haunted memories of political prisoners in South Africa, \u003ci\u003eWe Inherit the Fire\u003c\/i\u003e asks what it means to be truly known amidst the collective struggle.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e—Janika Oza, author of \u003ci\u003eA History of Burning\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"\u003ci\u003eWe Inherit the Fire \u003c\/i\u003eis a dazzling and poignant portrait of intergenerational love, trauma and resilience, about a hero mother and her teen daughter made strangers by apartheid’s violence. A story that will leave you fired up and holding your heart at the same time.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e—Farzana Doctor, author of \u003ci\u003eSeven \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Beauty of Us\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"Blazingly brilliant. In \u003ci\u003eWe Inherit the Fire\u003c\/i\u003e, Kagiso Lesego Molope brews a simmering coming of age story about the mother of a nation alight with violent, racist, and colonial oppression. While apartheid has ended, Lesego Molope reminds us a nascent state is not a utopian, static place to arrive at. She deftly situates the reader in intergenerational transitions from childhood to adulthood, using youthful longing and nostalgia and the struggles of motherhood to sharply question whether habitual and ongoing suppression should be fought through quiet dignity or by professing legitimate anger. She asks us, where we find ourselves in repressive situations, what costs we are willing to bear and complicates ideals of the mother figure through a fiery character drawn as iconic, heroic, rationally hostile yet traumatized.\"\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e—\u003c\/i\u003eJamie Chai Yun Liew, author of \u003ci\u003eDandelion\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e“To the world, Kewame 'Dolly' Malaka is a freedom fighter, a symbol of unyielding resistance. To her daughter, she is both formidable and fragile, scarred by prison and loss. Amid the final tremors of apartheid, \u003ci\u003eWe Inherit the Fire \u003c\/i\u003eis a haunting portrait of two lives bound by history and undone by its wounds; a mother and daughter wading through love, rage, and the unextinguishable blaze of memory.” \u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003efrancesca ekwuyasi, author of \u003c\/b\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eButter Honey Pig Bread\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eKagiso Lesego Molope is an Indigenous novelist and playwright of the San people of Southern Africa. She is the author of four other novels: \u003ci\u003eDancing in the Dust, \u003c\/i\u003ewhich was on the IBBY Honour List for 2006; \u003ci\u003eThe Mending Season\u003c\/i\u003e; \u003ci\u003eSuch a Lonely, Lovely Road\u003c\/i\u003e; and \u003ci\u003eThis Book Betrays My Brother\u003c\/i\u003e. She has been nominated for the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award four times. She is the winner of the 2014 Percy FitzPatrick Award, the 2019 Ottawa Book Award for Fiction, and the 2019 inaugural Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award. Across Southern Africa and in parts of Europe, her works are read in schools in several languages. She wrote the play \u003ci\u003eMaya Angelou: Black Woman Rising, \u003c\/i\u003ewhich was staged for five years at Oslo’s Nordic Black Theatre. She lives on the unceded and unsurrendered Anishinaabe Algonquin territory.","brand":"McClelland \u0026 Stewart","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233833726181,"sku":"NP9780771019852","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780771019852.jpg?v=1767743682","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/we-inherit-the-fire-isbn-9780771019852","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}