Praise for New York Times Bestseller Little Bee

*Shortlisted for the 2008 Costa Novel Award*

*New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice*

*Indie Next pick for February 2009*

*Santa Monica Citywide Reads selection 2010*

*Read St. Louis Contemporary Fiction selection for 2010*

*SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE*

"Little Bee will blow you away.… 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… is both surprising and inevitable, thoroughly satisfying if also heartrending."

—The Washington Post

[An] immensely readable and moving second novel… Cleave uses his emotionally charged narrative to challenge his readers’ conceptions of civility, of ethical choice. … The character and voice of Little Bee reveal Cleave at his finest. … An affecting story of human triumph.

—The New York Times Book Review

"One of the most vividly memorable and provocative characters in recent contemporary fiction. In Chris Cleave’s heartwarming and heartbreaking Little Bee… the tone veers quickly between humor and horror, a very dark, biting humor to be sure, but usually skating along a thin blade of irony, the kind to make you laugh with a little grimace. … The shift in perspective when we finally learn of Little Bee’s experience that fateful day on the beach is viscerally stunning and would be nearly impossible to bear had we not known of Little Bee’s strength and resilience. Cleave paces the story beautifully, lacing it with wit, compassion, and, even at the darkest moments, a searing ray of hope."

—The Boston Globe

Cleave has a Zola-esque ability to write big, and deeply. … Cleave makes the reader think about political issues and care about his characters.

—USA Today

"Every now and then, you come across a character in a book whose personality is so salient and whose story carries such devastating emotional force it’s as if she becomes a fixed part of your consciousness. So it is with the charmingly named title character in Chris Cleave’s brilliant and unforgettable Little Bee… sequined with lustrous turns of phrase, spanning two continents and driven by real-life global concerns. … What elevates this novel even further is Cleave’s forceful call for all of us, the floating masses of a globalized, socially isolating modern world, to look after one other."

—The Seattle Times

"Utterly enthralling page-turner… Novelist Cleave does a brilliant job of making both characters not only believable but memorable. … These compelling voices grip the reader’s heart and do not let go even after the book’s hyper-tense final page. Little Bee is a harrowing and heartening marvel of a novel."

—Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Cleave deftly moves the plot between a desolate stretch of Nigerian beach and the home in an upscale London suburb… [and he] invests poignancy and grace into the unspeakable atrocities that occur throughout the African continent in the name of oil exploration. … Heartbreaking one moment, quirky and charming the next, Little Bee will draw you in on the first page and linger in the mind long after the last chapter is closed."

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Electric… Please don’t fear a dull, worthy novel with a message—this is a suspenseful tale of two women survivors.

—Chicago Tribune

"Little Bee is a loud shout of talent."

—Chicago Sun-Times

Stunning.

—People (Four Stars and a People Pick)

"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

"Book clubs in search of the next Kite Runner need look no further than this astonishing, flawless novel. … Cleave (Incendiary) effortlessly moves between alternating viewpoints with lucid, poignant prose and the occasional lighter note. A tension-filled dramatic ending and plenty of moral dilemmas add up to a satisfying, emotional read."

—Library Journal (starred 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)

A psychologically charged story of grief, globalization and an unlikely friendship… Cleave’s narrative pulses with portentous, nearly spectral energy.

—Kirkus Reviews

Beautifully staged… Cleave has a sharp cinematic eye.

—Publishers Weekly

"Little Bee is a smart, topical novel about notions of community and family and about various kinds of violence, including the violence engendered by neglect. It’s also about the insular versus the global. … Cleave’s book asks us to step outside our own tidy borders, let the world in and embrace our own and others’ humanity."

—The Kansas City Star

This is an amazing book—beautifully written with a unique insight into the mind of a genocide victim. … Deeply moving, sad, hopeful, painful and inspiring—this bittersweet book is worth your time.

—Boulder Daily Camera (Colorado)

The charge, then: buy this book. Resist opening it until you are ready to start reading, for once you begin you’ll find yourself unable to stop. … Prepare yourself for Cleave’s poignancy, his control, and the pathos he so effortlessly evinces. Expect astonishment, for this is a work inspiring in depth and style; a work that alters perceptions.

—Bookslut

"Little Bee will amaze and delight you, and break your heart. It’s one of the finest books I’ve read in years, from its lyrical opening lines to its surprising end. … If I were still a bookseller, I’d sell Little Bee with a money-back guarantee."

—Shelf Awareness.com

Cleave has created a true page-turner, one that leaves the reader asking for more even after the final pages have been read. This is a book not to be missed.

—Belleville Intelligencer (Ontario, Canada)

"Besides sharp, witty dialogue, an emotionally charged plot and the vivid characters’ ethical struggles, Little Bee delivers a timely challenge to reinvigorate our notions of civilised decency."

—The Independent (UK)

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)

Searingly eloquent.

—Daily Mail (UK)

It would be a disservice to give away the powerful conclusion of this absorbing and gutsy story, which deals convincingly with ethical and personal accountability.

—Oxford Times (UK)

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For Joseph

Britain is proud of its tradition of providing a safe haven for people fleeting [sic] persecution and conflict.

—from Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship (UK Home Office, 2005)

MOST DAYS I WISH I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming. Maybe I would visit with you for the weekend and then suddenly, because I am fickle like that, I would visit with the man from the corner shop instead—but you would not be sad because you would be eating a cinnamon bun, or drinking a cold Coca-Cola from the can, and you would never think of me again. We would be happy, like lovers who met on holiday and forgot each other’s names.

A pound coin can go wherever it thinks it will be safest. It can cross deserts and oceans and leave the sound of gunfire and the bitter smell of burning thatch behind. When it feels warm and secure it will turn around and smile at you, the way my big sister Nkiruka used to smile at the men in our village in the short summer after she was a girl but before she was really a woman, and certainly before the evening my mother took her to a quiet place for a serious talk.

Of course a pound coin can be serious too. It can disguise itself as power, or property, and there is nothing more serious when you are a girl who has neither. You must try to catch the pound, and trap it in your pocket, so that it cannot reach a safe country unless it takes you with it. But a pound has all the tricks of a sorcerer. When pursued I have seen it shed its tail like a lizard so that you are left holding only pence. And when you finally go to seize it, the British pound can perform the greatest magic of all, and this is to transform itself into not one, but two, identical green American dollar bills. Your fingers will close on empty air, I am telling you.

How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalization. A girl like me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. Where to, sir? Western Civilization, my good man, and make it snappy.

See how nicely a British pound coin talks? It speaks with the voice of Queen Elizabeth the Second of England. Her face is stamped upon it, and sometimes when I look very closely I can see her lips moving. I hold her up to my ear. What is she saying? Put me down this minute, young lady, or I shall call my guards.

If the Queen spoke to you in such a voice, do you suppose it would be possible to disobey? I have read that the people around her—even kings and prime ministers—they find their bodies responding to her orders before their brains can even think why not. Let me tell you, it is not the crown and the scepter that have this effect. Me, I could pin a tiara on my short fuzzy hair, and I could hold up a scepter in one hand, like this, and police officers would still walk up to me in their big shoes and say, Love the ensemble, madam, now let’s have a quick look at your ID, shall we? No, it is not the Queen’s crown and scepter that rule in your land. It is her grammar and her voice. That is why it is desirable to speak the way she does. That way you can say to police officers, in a voice as clear as the Cullinan diamond, My goodness, how dare you?

I am only alive at all because I learned the Queen’s English. Maybe you are thinking, that isn’t so hard. After all, English is the official language of my country, Nigeria. Yes, but the trouble is that back home we speak it so much better than you. To talk the Queen’s English, I had to forget all the best tricks of my mother tongue. For example, the Queen could never say, There was plenty wahala, that girl done use her bottom power to engage my number one son and anyone could see she would end in the bad bush. Instead the Queen must say, My late daughter-in-law used her feminine charms to become engaged to my heir, and one might have foreseen that it wouldn’t end well. It is all a little sad, don’t you think? Learning the Queen’s English is like scrubbing off the bright red varnish from your toenails, the morning after a dance. It takes a long time and there is always a little bit left at the end, a stain of red along the growing edges to remind you of the good time you had. So, you can see that learning came slowly to me. On the other hand, I had plenty of time. I learned your language in an immigration detention center, in Essex, in the southeastern part of the United Kingdom. Two years, they locked me in there. Time was all I had.

But why did I go to all the trouble? It is because of what some of the older girls explained to me: to survive, you must look good or talk even better. The plain ones and the silent ones, it seems their paperwork is never in order. You say, they get repatriated. We say, sent home early. Like your country is a children’s party—something too wonderful to last forever. But the pretty ones and the talkative ones, we are allowed to stay. In this way your country becomes lively and more beautiful.

I will tell you what happened when they let me out of the immigration detention center. The detention officer put a voucher in my hand, a transport voucher, and he said I could telephone for a cab. I said, Thank you sir, may God move with grace in your life and bring joy into your heart and prosperity upon your loved ones. The officer pointed his eyes at the ceiling, like there was something very interesting up there, and he said, Jesus. Then he pointed his finger down the corridor and he said, There is the telephone.

So, I stood in the queue for the telephone. I was thinking, I went over the top with thanking that detention officer. The Queen would merely have said, Thank you, and left it like that. Actually, the Queen would have told the detention officer to call for the damn taxi himself, or she would have him shot and his head separated from his body and displayed on the railings in front of the Tower of London. I was realizing, right there, that it was one thing to learn the Queen’s English from books and newspapers in my detention cell, and quite another thing to actually speak the language with the English. I was angry with myself. I was thinking, You cannot afford to go around making mistakes like that, girl. If you talk like a savage who learned her English on the boat, the men are going to find you out and send you straight back home. That’s what I was thinking.

There were three girls in the queue in front of me. They let all us girls out on the same day. It was Friday. It was a bright sunny morning in May. The corridor was dirty but it smelled clean. That is a good trick. Bleach, is how they do that.

The detention officer sat behind his desk. He was not watching us girls. He was reading a newspaper. It was spread out on his desk. It was not one of the newspapers I learned to speak your language from—The Times or the Telegraph or The Guardian. No, this newspaper was not for people like you and me. There was a white girl in the newspaper photo and she was topless. You know what I mean when I say this, because it is your language we are speaking. But if I was telling this story to my big sister Nkiruka and the other girls from my village back home then I would have to stop, right here, and explain to them: topless does not mean, the lady in the newspaper did not have an upper body. It means, she was not wearing any garments on her upper body. You see the difference?

—Wait. Not even a brassiere?

—Not even a brassiere.

—Weh!

And then I would start my story again, but those girls back home, they would whisper between them. They would giggle behind their hands. Then, just as I was getting back to my story about the morning they let me out of the immigration detention center, those girls would interrupt me again. Nkiruka would say, Listen, okay? Listen. Just so we are clear. This girl in the newspaper photo. She was a prostitute, yes? A night fighter? Did she look down at the ground from shame?

—No, she did not look down at the ground from shame. She looked right in the camera and smiled.

—What, in the newspaper?

—Yes.

—Then is it not shameful in Great Britain, to show your bobbis in the newspaper?

—No. It is not shameful. The boys like it and there is no shame. Otherwise the topless girls would not smile like that, do you see?

—So do all the girls over there show them off like that? Walk around with their bobbis bouncing? In the church and in the shop and in the street?

—No, only in the newspapers.

—Why do they not all show their breasts, if the men like it and there is no shame?

—I do not know.

—You lived there more than two years, little miss been-to. How come you not know?

—It is like that over there. Much of my life in that country was lived in such confusion. Sometimes I think that even the British do not know the answers to such questions.

—Weh!

This is what it would be like, you see, if I had to stop and explain every little thing to the girls back home. I would have to explain linoleum and bleach and soft-core pornography and the shape-changing magic of the British one-pound coin, as if all of these everyday things were very wonderful mysteries. And very quickly my own story would get lost in this great ocean of wonders because it would seem as if your country was an enchanted federation of miracles and my own story within it was really very small and unmagical. But with you it is much easier because I can say to you, look, on the morning they released us, the duty officer at the immigration detention center was staring at a photo of a topless girl in the newspaper. And you understand the situation straightaway. That is the reason I spent two years learning the Queen’s English, so that you and I could speak like this without an interruption.

The detention officer, the one who was looking at the topless photo in the newspaper—he was a small man and his hair was pale, like the tinned mushroom soup they served us on Tuesdays. His wrists were thin and white like electrical cables covered in plastic. His uniform was bigger than he was. The shoulders of the jacket rose up in two bumps, one on each side of his head, as if he had little animals hiding in there. I thought of those creatures blinking in the light when he took off his jacket in the evening. I was thinking, Yes sir, if I was your wife I would keep my brassiere on, thank you.

And then I was thinking, Why are you staring at that girl in the newspaper, mister, and not us girls here in the queue for the telephone? What if we all ran away? But then I remembered, they were letting us out. This was hard to understand after so much time. Two years, I lived in that detention center. I was fourteen years of age when I came to your country but I did not have any papers to prove it and so they put me in the same detention center as the adults. The trouble was, there were men and women locked up together in that place. At night they kept the men in a different wing of the detention center. They caged them like wolves when the sun went down, but in the daytime the men walked among us, and ate the same food we did. I thought they still looked hungry. I thought they watched me with ravenous eyes. So when the older girls whispered to me, To survive you must look good or talk good, I decided that talking would be safer for me.

I made myself undesirable. I declined to wash, and I let my skin grow oily. Under my clothes I wound a wide strip of cotton around my chest, to make my breasts small and flat. When the charity boxes arrived, full of secondhand clothes and shoes, some of the other girls tried to make themselves pretty but I rummaged through the cartons to find clothes that hid my shape. I wore loose blue jeans and a man’s Hawaiian shirt and heavy black boots with the steel toe caps shining through the torn leather. I went to the detention nurse and I made her cut my hair very short with medical scissors. For the whole two years I did not smile or even look in any man’s face. I was terrified. Only at night, after they locked the men away, I went back to my detention cell and I unwound the cloth from my breasts and I breathed deeply. Then I took off my heavy boots and I drew my knees up to my chin. Once a week, I sat on the foam mattress of my bed and I painted my toenails. I found the little bottle of nail varnish at the bottom of a charity box. It still had the price ticket on it. If I ever discover the person who gave it then I will tell them, for the cost of one British pound and ninety-nine pence, they saved my life. Because this is what I did in that place, to remind myself I was alive underneath everything: under my steel toe caps I wore bright red nail varnish. Sometimes when I took my boots off I screwed up my eyes against the tears and I rocked back and fro, shivering from the cold.

My big sister Nkiruka, she became a woman in the growing season, under the African sun, and who can blame her if the great red heat of it made her giddy and flirtatious? Who could not lean back against the doorpost of their house and smile with quiet indulgence when they saw my mother sitting her down to say, Nkiruka, beloved one, you must not smile at the older boys like that?

Me, I was a woman under white fluorescent strip lights, in an underground room in an immigration detention center forty miles east of London. There were no seasons there. It was cold, cold, cold, and I did not have anyone to smile at. Those cold years are frozen inside me. The African girl they locked up in the immigration detention center, poor child, she never really escaped. In my soul she is still locked up in there, forever, under the fluorescent lights, curled up on the green linoleum floor with her knees tucked up under her chin. And this woman they released from the immigration detention center, this creature that I am, she is a new breed of human. There is nothing natural about me. I was born—no, I was reborn—in captivity. I learned my language from your newspapers, my clothes are your castoffs, and it is your pound that makes my pockets ache with its absence. Imagine a young woman cut out from a smiling Save the Children magazine advertisement, who dresses herself in threadbare pink clothes from the recycling bin in your local supermarket car park and speaks English like the leader column of The Times, if you please. I would cross the street to avoid me. Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.

So, I am a refugee, and I get very lonely. Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English, as if English had collided with Ibo, high in the upper atmosphere, and rained down into her mouth in a shower that half-drowns her and leaves her choking up sweet tales about the bright African colors and the taste of fried plantain? Not like a storyteller, but like a victim rescued from the flood, coughing up the colonial water from her lungs?

Excuse me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come to talk to you about the bright African colors. I am a born-again citizen of the developing world, and I will prove to you that the color of my life is gray. And if it should be that I secretly love fried plantain, then that must stay between us and I implore you to tell no one. Okay?

The morning they let us out of the detention center, they gave us all our possessions. I held mine in a see-through plastic bag. A Collins Gem Pocket English Dictionary, one pair of gray socks, one pair of gray briefs, and one United Kingdom Driver’s License that was not mine, and one water-stained business card that was not mine either. If you want to know, these things belonged to a white man called Andrew O’Rourke. I met him on a beach.

This small plastic bag is what I was holding in my hand when the detention officer told me to go and stand in the queue for the telephone. The first girl in the queue, she was tall and she was pretty. Her thing was beauty, not talking. I wondered which of us had made the best choice to survive. This girl, she had plucked her eyebrows out and then she had drawn them back on again with a pencil. This is what she had done to save her life. She was wearing a purple dress, an A-line dress with pink stars and moons in the pattern. She had a nice pink scarf wrapped around her hair, and purple flip-flops on her feet. I was thinking she must have been locked up a very long time in our detention center. One has to go through a very great number of the charity boxes, you will understand, to put together an outfit that is truly an ensemble.

On the girl’s brown legs there were many small white scars. I was thinking, Do those scars cover the whole of you, like the stars and the moons on your dress? I thought that would be pretty too, and I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived.

In a few breaths’ time I will speak some sad words to you. But you must hear them the same way we have agreed to see scars now. Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive. The next thing you know, something fine will happen to her, something marvelous, and then she will turn around and smile.

The girl with the purple A-line dress and the scars on her legs, she was already talking into the telephone receiver. She was saying, Hello, taxi? Yu come pick me up, yeh? Good. Oh, where me come? Me come from Jamaica, darlin, you better believe that. Huh? What? Oh, where me come right now? Okay wait please.

She put her hand to cover the telephone receiver. She turned around to the second girl in the queue and she said, Listen darlin, what name is dis place, where we at right now? But the second girl just looked up at her and shrugged her shoulders. The second girl was thin and her skin was dark brown and her eyes were green like a jelly sweet when you suck the outside sugar off and hold it up against the moon. She was so pretty, I cannot even explain. She was wearing a yellow sari dress. She was holding a see-through plastic bag like mine, but there was nothing in it. At first I thought it was empty but then I thought, Why do you carry that bag, girl, if there is nothing in it? I could see her sari through it, so I decided she was holding a bag full of lemon yellow. That is everything she owned when they let us girls out.

I knew that second girl a bit. I was in the same room as her for two weeks one time, but I never talked with her. She did not speak one word of anyone’s English. That is why she just shrugged and held on tight to her bag of lemon yellow. So the girl on the phone, she pointed her eyes up at the ceiling, the same way the detention officer at his desk did.

Then the girl on the phone turned to the third girl in the queue and she said to her, Do yu know the name of dis place where we is at? But the third girl did not know either. She just stood there, and she was wearing a blue T-shirt and blue denim jeans and white Dunlop Green Flash trainers, and she just looked down at her own see-through bag, and her bag was full of letters and documents. There was so much paper in that bag, all crumpled and creased, she had to hold one hand under the bag to stop it all bursting out. Now, this third girl, I knew her a little bit too. She was not pretty and she was not a good talker either, but there is one more thing that can save you from being sent home early. This girl’s thing was, she had her story all written down and made official. There were rubber stamps at the end of her story that said in red ink this is TRUE. I remember she told me her story once and it went something like, the-men-came-and-they-

burned-my-village-

tied-my-girls-

raped-my-girls-

took-my-girls-

whipped-my-husband-

cut-my-breast-

I-ran-away-

through-the-bush-

found-a-ship-

crossed-the-sea-

and-then-they-put-me-in-here. Or some such story like that. I got confused with all the stories in that detention center. All the girls’ stories started out, the-men-came-and-they. And all of the stories finished, and-then-they-put-me-in-here. All the stories were sad, but you and I have made our agreement concerning sad words. With this girl—girl three in the queue—her story had made her so sad that she did not know the name of the place where she was at and she did not want to know. The girl was not even curious.

So the girl with the telephone receiver, she asked her again. What? she said. Yu no talk neither? How come yu not know the name dis place we at?

Then the third girl in the queue, she just pointed her eyes up at the ceiling, and so the girl with the telephone receiver pointed her own eyes up at the ceiling for a second time. I was thinking, Okay, now the detention officer has looked at the ceiling one time and girl three has looked at the ceiling one time and girl one has looked at the ceiling two times, so maybe there are some answers up on that ceiling after all. Maybe there is something very cheerful up there. Maybe there are stories written on the ceiling that go something like the-men-came-and-they-

brought-us-colorful-dresses-

fetched-wood-for-the-fire-

told-some-crazy-jokes-

drank-beer-with-us-

chased-us-till-we-giggled-

stopped-the-mosquitoes-from-biting-

told-us-the-trick-for-catching-the-British-one-pound-coin-

turned-the-moon-into-cheese-

Oh, and then they put me in here.

I looked at the ceiling, but it was only white paint and fluorescent light tubes up there.

The girl on the telephone, she finally looked at me. So I said to her, The name of this place is the Black Hill Immigration Removal Centre. The girl stared at me. Yu kiddin wid me, she said. What kine of a name is dat? So I pointed at the little metal plate that was screwed on the wall above the telephone. The girl looked at it and then she looked back to me and she said, Sorry darlin, I can not ridd it. So I read it out to her, and I pointed to the words one at a time. BLACK HILL IMMIGRATION REMOVAL CENTRE, HIGH EASTER, CHELMSFORD, ESSEX. Thank you precious, the first girl said, and she lifted up the telephone receiver.

She said into the receiver: All right now listen mister, the place I is right now is called Black Hill Immigration Removal. Then she said, No, please, wait. Then she looked sad and she put the telephone receiver back down on the telephone. I said, What is wrong? The first girl sighed and she said, Taxi man say he no pick up from dis place. Then he say, You people are scum. You know dis word?

I said no, because I did not know for sure, so I took my Collins Gem Pocket English Dictionary out of my see-through bag and I looked up the word. I said to the first girl, You are a film of impurities or vegetation that can form on the surface of a liquid. She looked at me and I looked at her and we giggled because we did not understand what to do with the information. This was always my trouble when I was learning to speak your language. Every word can defend itself. Just when you go to grab it, it can split into two separate meanings so the understanding closes on empty air. I admire you people. You are like sorcerers and you have made your language as safe as your money.

So me and the first girl in the telephone queue, we were giggling at each other, and I was holding my see-through bag and she was holding her see-through bag. There was one black eyebrow pencil and one pair of tweezers and three rings of dried pineapple in hers. The first girl saw me looking at her bag and she stopped giggling.