Product Description
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.

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, February 2009: The publishers of Chris Cleave's new novel "don't want to spoil" the story by revealing too much about it, and there's good reason not to tell too much about the plot's pivot point. All you should know going in to Little Bee is that what happens on the beach is brutal, and that it braids the fates of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan (who calls herself Little Bee) and a well-off British couple--journalists trying to repair their strained marriage with a free holiday--who should have stayed behind their resort's walls. The tide of that event carries Little Bee back to their world, which she claims she couldn't explain to the girls from her village because they'd have no context for its abundance and calm. But she shows us the infinite rifts in a globalized world, where any distance can be crossed in a day--with the right papers--and "no one likes each other, but everyone likes U2." Where you have to give up the safety you'd assumed as your birthright if you decide to save the girl gazing at you through razor wire, left to the wolves of a failing state. --Mari Malcolm

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 92 reviews)

Heartbreaking illumination by Constant Reader (Houston, TX)

5 Stars
November 16, 2009
Little Bee is a brilliant novel that will stay in your thoughts for a long time. A young girl in Nigeria has endured and witnessed the unthinkable as the corruption of the government and other unnamed forces of power rain unspeakable evil on the people. Chris Cleave reveals the story in bits and pieces, through Little Bee and the Englishwoman who crossed her path one fateful day on the beach in Nigeria. Do not read this book for escape, to help you fall asleep or to make you feel warm and fuzzy. We all look for those kinds of books at different times in our lives, but this is not one of those. That said, everyone should read this book. I want my children (17 to 25) to read this book. I want those who rant on the radio about illegal immigration to read this book. We can be unspeakably naive. There is much to think about in this book as you put yourself in the various scenes. Chris Cleave does a wonderful job of creating empathy in the reader. It is impossible not wonder what you would have done at various points. How brave are you? How much are you willing to do to protect someone other than yourself and your family? What are the costs of that and who will pay those costs? (Like the poor soldier at the compound saddled with trying to herd the incredibly ignorant tourists back to safety, while they in their arrogance ignore him as an aggravation.) I found the characters believable and interesting, if not always likeable. While this novel has political, social, and moral themes, it is an extremely personal story of these two women and not a sermon or dissertation. Our book group has read it and I am looking forward to the discussion. Some good books have little to discuss, but Little Bee is not one of those. Little Bee is a book that will stay with me unlike many of the books I read. Next time I read about a new mineral project in a third world country, I will not be thinking about it as good news for the country and the developing corporations. I will be worrying about the local population and praying that the developing corporations are using their power to make sure that local corruption does not do evil on their behalf. We are often reminded in our day to day life to be grateful for our blessings and grateful for our problems. Little Bee is a graphic reminder of how fortunate most of us are and perhaps a call to us to do something other than bury our heads in the sand and collect dividends on these type of profiteering.

After the Sting, the Barb Remains by C. P. Jackson (Fairfax)

5 Stars
November 09, 2009
Starting with the skinny summary on the flyleaf and continuing into the narrative, `Little Bee' reads like a fable. Like a dark fairy tale it's told from two, first-person points of view. Because the author entreats the reader to refrain from divulging what happens to Little Bee, a Nigerian refugee and Sarah, a British magazine editor, it's not easy to write a review that sufficiently explains the five-star rating that the novel deserves. Without letting slip any spoilers, I will say that the reader is never certain that any one of the richly drawn characters will live happily ever after. Cleve unfolds the story subtly by alternating the narrative between Little Bee and Sarah, two people who could not be more different by every measure. Through them, and the supporting characters, the writer describes the spectrum of human emotions and forces the reader to really feel them. By the time it's understood what has brought them together, and will bind them forever, there is such real sorrow that you will not close this book without weeping. Each character contributes to the story; there are no superfluous roles here. This story is bigger than the personal impact of a single event on a few people. It forces the reader to examine his or her own views of social justice. We may do nothing other than think about it; yet, we will not easily forget this piece of fiction that is very real for far too many.

Amazing by Lit Chick (Naperville, Il)

5 Stars
October 13, 2009
Just simply stunning! Beautifully written in two voices. Amazing and horrible at the same time, like watching a train wreck! Couldn't put it down.

Just read it by Young

5 Stars
September 13, 2009
It has been a long while since a novel kept me up late into the early hours of morning, and as soon as I turned the final page (which I read over several times) I immediately wanted to email the author to say "Bravo." The writing is compelling and wry, and the characters are beautifully rendered. I understand how some would criticize the story itself as somewhat contrived, but it is an important, relevant story and one knows the grim parts of the narrative are less horrific than what is happening right now all over the globe. It didn't feel contrived to me, as one knows such detention centers exist, one knows that brutalized refugees materialize in western countries and are sent back to certain imprisonment, torture, and death, and as one knows how very lucky we readers are to be taking it all in from the distance of print and TV news. This book broke my heart, and I'm so glad I read it.

Bittersweet by Emily Braun (Long Island)

4 Stars
August 25, 2009
This is the story of Little Bee. She is a 16 year old Nigerian girl released after 2 years in a detention center in England. The only people she knows in England is a tourist couple she met on the beach 2 years ago. She shows up on the day of the mans funeral and becomes entwined in the lives of the widow and his child. This was a lovely but bittersweet story and some of the scenes are rough. I gave only 4 stars because I would have ended it differently but it was enjoyable to read and I liked the characters.

SIMILAR PRODUCTS

	Incendiary by Chris Cleave (Author) When a massive suicide bomb explodes at a London soccer match a woman loses both her four-year-old son and her husband. But the bombing is only the beginning. In a voice alive with grief, compassion, and startling humor, Incendiary is a stunning debut of one ordinary life blown apart by terror.
	Cutting for Stone: A novel by Abraham Verghese (Author) A sweeping, emotionally riveting first novel—an enthralling family saga of Africa and America, doctors and patients, exile and home. Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother’s death in childbirth and their father’s disappearance, bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as...
	The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Author) Three ordinary women are about to take one extraordinary step. Twenty-two-year-old Skeeter has just returned home after graduating from Ole Miss. She may have a degree, but it is 1962, Mississippi, and her mother will not be happy till Skeeter has a ring on her finger. Skeeter would normally find solace with her beloved maid Constantine, the woman who raised her, but Constantine has disappeared and no one will tell Skeeter where she has gone. Aibileen is a black maid, a wise,...
	The Vagrants: A Novel by Yiyun Li (Author) Brilliant and illuminating, this astonishing debut novel by the award-winning writer Yiyun Li is set in China in the late 1970s, when Beijing was rocked by the Democratic Wall Movement, an anti-Communist groundswell designed to move China beyond the dark shadow of the Cultural Revolution toward a more enlightened and open society. In this powerful and beautiful story, we follow a group of people in a small town during this dramatic and harrowing time, the era that was a forebear of the...
	The Housekeeper and the Professor: A Novel by Yoko Ogawa (Author) He is a brilliant math Professor with a peculiar problem--ever since a traumatic head injury, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. She is an astute young Housekeeper, with a ten-year-old son, who is hired to care for him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. Though he cannot hold memories for long (his brain is like a tape that begins to...