Chris Cleave’s New Page-Turner

We all know movies like Crash and Babel, in which characters of completely different worlds lead parallel lives until, of course, they finally meet. Chris Cleave’s new novel, Little Bee, weaves together two women’s lives in just such a way. He presents a 16-year-old illegal immigrant from Nigeria who lives in a detention center, and a magazine editor enjoying life in a posh suburb. Seattle Post-Intelligencer reviewer John Marshall calls the book an “utterly enthralling” page-turner. The two women’s lives unite over tragedy, and in the end, you guessed it: each saves the other, “their common humanity far outweighing vast differences in background and circumstances.”