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Little Bee

by Chris Cleave

ISBN13: 9781416589631
ISBN10: 1416589635
All Product Details

Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)

"Little Bee deserves a warning label: 'Do not judge this book by its cover. Contents under pressure.' Despite the cutesy title (the book was more sensibly published in Britain as The Other Hand) and the coy book-flap description ('It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it'), Little Bee will blow you away." Sarah L. Courteau, The Washington Post Book World (read the entire Washington Post Book World review)

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

We don't want to tell you too much about this book!

It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it.

Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this:

It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.

The story starts there, but the book doesn't.

And it's what happens afterward that is most important.

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

Review:

"Little Bee" deserves a warning label: "Do not judge this book by its cover. Contents under pressure." Despite the cutesy title (the book was more sensibly published in Britain as "The Other Hand") and the coy book-flap description ("It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it"), "Little Bee" will blow you away.

Like Ian McEwan's propulsive novel "Enduring Love,"... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) in which a fatal hot-air balloon accident binds together two strangers who witness it, "Little Bee," by Guardian columnist Chris Cleave, hinges on a single horrific encounter. On a beach in Nigeria, the lives of Little Bee, a teenager from a small village, and Sarah O'Rourke, editor of a posh British women's magazine, are brought into brutal conjunction. Little Bee and her older sister have the misfortune to live on valuable Nigerian oil deposits, for which their family pays a deadly price. Sarah and her husband, heedless tourists out for a walk in the sand, are confronted in an instant with a choice: Save the girls at great personal cost or ignore them.

Though the scene doesn't come until later in the book, it casts a queasy spell over the novel from the beginning, which finds Little Bee in a casually dehumanizing British immigrant detention center two years later. She's plotting her suicide if "the men" ever come for her again. (Her Nigerian enemies and the interests they work for are never explicitly identified because Little Bee herself understands only that they were paid to remove her people.) Little Bee is a young woman with a past so damaging that it seems to negate the possibility of a future, but her tensile stubbornness keeps her going. "Take it from me," she says at the outset, "a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived." Her very name is a mechanism for survival: On the run from their pursuers after the rest of their village was destroyed, she and her sister plucked new names from the air to replace their true ones, "which spoke so loudly of their tribe and of their region." Little Bee has taught herself English from newspapers during her detainment, but her reference points are still in Nigeria. The voice Cleave has created for her illustrates the forcible dislocations of a globalized world.

Sarah, meanwhile, has a life that invites envy: a whip-smart husband, an adorable son, a satisfying adulterous affair and a glamorous career; the full story is more complex, though, and Cleave gives it to us with unpitying sympathy. When Sarah's husband spirals into depression after their crisis on the Nigerian beach and commits suicide, Sarah is left to reckon with her own moral culpability and a bereft 3-year-old. Then Little Bee, for whom she feels a powerful and naive responsibility, appears at her door, sprung under dubious circumstances from the detention facility.

In restrained, diamond-hard prose, Cleave alternates between these two characters' points of view as he pulls the threads of their dark — but often funny — story tight. What unfolds between them in a few short weeks as they struggle to right worlds turned upside down is both surprising and inevitable, thoroughly satisfying if also heart-rending.

Nearly four years ago Cleave's first novel, "Incendiary," about an al-Qaeda bomb attack at a London soccer match, was published in Britain on the very day that suicide bombers killed 52 people in London's transit system. This gruesome coincidence called into question whether Cleave's talent was responsible for the attention the novel received. "Little Bee" leaves little doubt that Cleave deserves the praise. He has carved two indelible characters whose choices in even the most straitened circumstances permit them dignity — if they are willing to sacrifice for it. "Little Bee" is the best kind of political novel: You're almost entirely unaware of its politics because the book doesn't deal in abstractions but in human beings.

Reviewed by Sarah L. Courteau, who is the literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Review:

"Book clubs in search of the next Kite Runner need look no further than this astonishing, flawless novel....A tension-filled dramatic ending and plenty of moral dilemmas add up to a satisfying, emotional read. Highly recommended." Library Journal (Starred Review)

Review:

"Cleave is a nerves-of-steel storyteller of stealthy power, and this is a novel as resplendent and menacing as life itself." Booklist (Starred Review)

Review:

"Cleave's narrative pulses with portentous, nearly spectral energy, and the author maintains a well-modulated balance between the two narrators. A solid sophomore effort, and hopefully a sign of even better things to come." Kirkus Reviews

Review:

"An ambitious and fearless gallop from the jungles of Africa via a shocking encounter on a Nigerian beach to the media offices of London and domesticity in leafy suburbia....Cleave immerses the reader in the worlds of his characters with an unshakable confidence." The Guardian (UK)

Review:

"The voice that speaks from the first page of Chris Cleave's Little Bee is one you might never have heard — the voice of a smart, wary, heartsick immigrant scarred by the terrors of her past....Read this urgent and wryly funny novel for its insights into simple humanity, the force that can disarm fear." O Magazine

Review:

"Suffice it to say that this novel takes as its starting point unspeakable violence, but that it is accessible and humane, rich and rewarding. The plotting is masterful, the characters unforgettable. And while it is utterly topical, it turns on timeless questions of freedom, guilt and responsibility and, finally, what it means to be human." Portland Oregonian

Synopsis:

From the author of the international bestseller Incendiary comes a haunting novel about the tenuous friendship that blooms between two disparate strangers — one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London.

Synopsis:

WE DON'T WANT TO TELL YOU TOO MUCH ABOUT THIS BOOK.

It is a truly special story and we don't want to spoil it.

Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this:

It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific.

The story starts there, but the book doesn't.

And it's what happens afterward that is most important.

Once you have read it, you'll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don't tell them what happens either. The magic is in how it unfolds.

About the Author

Chris Cleave is a columnist for The Guardian newspaper in London. His first novel, Incendiary, was published in twenty countries; won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award; was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers' Prize; won the United States Book-of-the-Month Club's First Fiction Award; and won the Prix Special du Jury at the French Prix des Lecteurs 2007. His second novel, Little Bee, was shortlisted for the prestigious Costa Award for Best Novel. He lives in London with his French wife and two mischievous Anglo-French children. He keeps his website at www.chriscleave.com.

What Our Readers Are Saying

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Average customer rating based on 3 comments:

: cariola119, November 29, 2009 (view all comments by cariola119)
It was hard to know just what to expect of this book. It's one of those that tells you on the jacket that you are in for a lot of surprises, we don't want to spoil it by telling you much, and please don't give anything away. For the life of me, I'm not sure I understand why there needed to be all this mystery. It's the story of a young Nigerian woman who, at the beginning of the novel, has been "unofficially" released from a detention center in England. Among her few belongings are the driver's license and business card of Andrew Rourke, a reporter that she tells us she had met on a beach in Nigeria several years earlier. She makes her way to his home, and the story becomes one told alternately by Little Bee and Rourke's wife, Sarah.

So I won't really give away any more. We learn what has happened to Little Bee in Nigeria, how Sarah and her husband first came to be involved with her, and how Little Bee becomes a part of the llife of Sarah and her four-year old son, Charlie (otherwise known as Batman for the costume he literally lives in). And it becomes, in the end, a story of redemption, sacrifice, and understanding. Cleave has a charmingly lyrical style that particularly suits his central character.

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: Suzanne Levin, July 9, 2009 (view all comments by Suzanne Levin)
I just finished reading Little Bee by Chris Cleave and feel a small loss for words about what to write. The publishers took a big risk with the promos for this book, they didn't really tell the reader what it was all about - "We don't want to tell you what happens in this book...nevertheless, you need to know enough to buy it" and so they give you a little tidbit about it being "the story of two women whose lives collide one fateful day", but it is so much more than that. First we meet Little Bee and simply fall in love. She is so innocent, but quite insightful. " I wish I was a British pound coin instead of a African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming." Little Bee is a 16 year old Nigerian refugee surviving in a UK immigration detention center. How she came to be in the immigration center is part of the story, as well as how she meets Sarah & Andrew O'Rourke, a young affluent couple from England who were "on Holiday" in Nigeria, very naive to the violence that was raging in the area. Leading up to the tale of violence that links Sarah and Little Bee on that Nigerian beach, we meet a cast of characters from the detention center that will make you laugh and cry at the same time. And it opens your eyes just a bit because you begin to realize that even though this is a fictional book, these detention centers really exist and so do some of the horrors you are reading about. The writing is captivating - and we are drawn into Little Bee's world. We realize how Little Bee is not so different from Sarah. The book is written through both Little Bee and Sarah's voice and towards the end I began forgetting who's voice was speaking to me. The story does not stop at the detention center, and as if their lives were bound by something untouchable on that fateful day, Sarah and Little Bee meet again... I really enjoyed this book! The writing and characters will touch your heart! Make this one of your next reads!
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: Denise Morland, February 18, 2009 (view all comments by Denise Morland)
Little Bee by Chris Cleave is the story of what happens when the lives of Sarah, a British magazine editor and Little Bee, a Nigerian teenager collide. The resulting conflict is spectacular and stunning. This is an eye-opening , devastating book told from the perspectives of these two very different women, neither of whom can turn a blind eye to the tragedies taking place around them.

This was a hard book for me to read. The jacket blurb in no way prepares you for what is coming and the story, though it leaves you with some hope, is ultimately very sad. However, this is a book that you need to read, if only to be more aware of what is happening in other parts of the world and how little we are doing to stop these tragedies. Maybe this book will persuade more people to follow Sarah's example and refuse to turn a blind eye.
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Product Details

ISBN:: 9781416589631
Author:: Cleave, Chris
Publisher:: Simon & Schuster
Subject:: Literary
Subject:: Young women
Subject:: Emigration and immigration
Subject:: Identity (psychology)
Publication Date:: February 2009
Binding:: Hardcover
Grade Level:: General/trade
Language:: English
Pages:: 271
Dimensions:: 9.25 x 6.25 in

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