WE INHERIT THE FIRE, a novel

276pp., paperback, First SA Edition, Penguin, Cape Town, 2026

ISBN: 9781776393244

First published in Canada in 2026.

An unflinching portrait of the fractured relationship between a mother and her daughter, set against the tumultuous end of apartheid in South Africa.

In the late 1980s Kelelo, the teenage daughter of celebrated freedom fighter Kewame “Dolly” Malaka, is forced to leave her mountain school for a newly desegregated school in town. While her classmates see her as a symbol of progress, at home she struggles with a mother who is emotionally unreachable, haunted by the violence and deprivation she endured as a political prisoner.

“Blazingly brilliant ... 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.” Jamie Chai Yun Liew, author of Dandelion

“Kagiso Lesego Molope writes with striking precision and intelligence, crafting prose that moves like poetry while speaking directly to the heart ... Deftly weaving the less told stories of young women and the haunted memories of political prisoners in South Africa, We Inherit the Fire asks what it means to be truly known amidst the collective struggle." Janika Oza, author of A History of Burning

Kagiso Lesego Molope was born in Atteridgeville, Pretoria. She is the author of the novels Dancing in the Dust, The Mending Season, Such a Lonely, Lovely Road and This Book Betrays My Brother, and has received the 2014 Percy FitzPatrick Award, the 2019 Ottawa Book Award for Fiction, and the 2019 inaugural Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award. She currently lives in Canada.