Hello Brittle Paperians. Happy New Year! This is our weekly reminder to check in on your TBR list and see what might be missing. This week, we’re spotlighting We Inherit the Fire by Kagiso Lesego Molope. The book was published by McClelland & Stewart who Molope has said she really loved working with.

History is a complicated thing, and even more complicated is how we live with its aftershocks. We Inherit the Fire takes up the waning of apartheid through the intimate lives of people we often think of only as grand historical actors.

This is Molope’s fifth novel and continues her interest in examining South Africa’s history of violence, as well as the resistance against it. Molope is born and raised in South Africa and later based in Canada. We Inherit the Fire examines apartheid through the lives of women who survived it and in the children who grow up alongside its ghosts.

The novel is set in the late 1980s. In the background, the world watches as the public spectacle of apartheid’s end plays out. But the novel focuses on the relationship between a mother and her daughter. The mother, Kewame “Dolly” Malaka, is a celebrated freedom fighter. Her life has taken on the weight of resistance mythology. But what is it like to be a freedom fighter and a mother? Being a figure of history, one of those people who help bend the arc of justice so new worlds can come into being, has it costs for those who live and love these larger than life individuals.

Kewame’s daughter Kelelo is caught in all of this. She is child of a hero, which at the pivotal moment in her nation’s history sounds like a great thing. But she is also a teenage girl trying to navigate a new school and the complexities of growing up as a young woman while watching her mother confront her own memories of the struggle and her life as a political prisoner. What is the cost of survival? How does a woman built for resistance forge a new sense of self in a shifting world? And what does her daughter inherit in the process?

It’s also worth mentioning that Molope has built a body of work that keeps returning to teenage girls as central characters. Several of her earlier novels are told through the lives of young women coming of age in moments of social and political intensity. Against this archive of work, Kelelo is part of a larger conversation Molope has been having for years about how we write the lives of young women. This makes We Inherit the Fire really interesting to follow.

If you’re drawn to stories about mothers and daughters, about political icons seen from the inside, and about the aftermath of collective struggle, this is one to add to your TBR list.