Author - Chris Cleave
 
Chris Cleave has done something truly stunning with language in this book, but it's not just the language. The story is fascinating and utterly believable despite its vast coincidences, even the book jacket is arresting.

Little Bee is a Nigerian girl who has learned to talk like the Queen. She's a refugee who has been detained in an immigration detention centre forty miles east of London for two years.

I've never heard a Nigerian woman speaking the Queen's English, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the dialogue. But I believed in Little Bee from the first paragraph, and I loved her by page eighteen.

Little Bee's life is entangled, by accident, with the life of another woman, Sarah, a white British magazine editor who lives in Kingston-upon-Thames.

Sarah has just had something terrible happen to her, and she can't figure out how to feel. Sarah and Little Bee knew each other briefly in other terrible circumstances while Sarah was on vacation in Nigeria.

Now Little Bee is in the middle of Sarah's real life. There are Sarah’s young son, husband and a lover in the mix.
 
Little Bee is in Britain illegally - Sarah's life has lost its meaning and Cleave works his magic throughout: the two women learn how to help each other.

Their relationship feels perfectly natural. And although all sorts of horrible, depressing, unjust things happen in Little Bee, it's the most hopeful book I've ever read, it will just blow you away.