Fiction Pick of the Week: Little Bee

Little Bee by Chris Cleave (2009) is without doubt one of the best books I have read this year. Little Bee is a 16-year old Nigerian girl who has a terrifying confrontation with some wild, crazed men wielding machetes with murderous intent on an African beach. Two English tourists, Sarah and her husband Andrew, become a part of this hideous event. This is a profound and deeply moving story of two alien cultures whose lives are irrevocably changed by those events . After a two-year incarceration as a political refugee in an English detention centre, Little Bee once again enters Sarah's life as she shows up unannounced on Sarah's doorstep in London, England. Little Bee is naive, and capable of great courage and hope but her presence in England profoundly changes the life of everyone she encounters.

This bittersweet novel with an emotionally charged plot and vivid characters is a very special book indeed that will cause you to think deeply and feel a desire to have the story go on forever.