When she knocks on Andrew’s door, his widow answers. She has no legal papers, but she does have the driver’s license of a British man named Andrew O’Rourke, whom she met on a beach in Nigeria years earlier. Little Bee has spent two years in a detention center outside of London when she is released by error. The novel explores an essential question of humanity: How far would you go to help a suffering stranger? It can disguise itself as power, or property, and there is nothing more serious when you are a girl who has neither.” Here I felt a mix of near-deranged excitement ( this could be IT!) and surrender: Tell me the story, Chris Cleave.Īnd what a story it is. The arresting voice of the title character Little Bee, a sixteen-year-old Nigerian girl seeking political asylum in the United Kingdom, is the beating heart of this gorgeous novel, and its poetry and humor have an enveloping rhythm.įurther down the first page, Little Bee says, “A pound coin can be serious too. As an acquiring editor, it’s my ideal, each time I open a submission, to check those boxes and be open to falling in love. You’re buoyed by voice, by character, by story. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming.”-the world fell away.Įvery reader knows the sensation of falling for a book. When I received the submission Little Bee by British author Chris Cleave in 2007 and read the first lines-“Most days I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl.
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