CLEAVE, Chris. Little Bee. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, 2015.

Octavo. Full brown leather. Spine with four raised bands, 22-carat gilt accents. Gilt design to covers. All edges gilt. Moiré silk endpapers. Satin ribbon page marker. 266 pp. Signed Collector's Edition. Signed by the author on the special signature page. Includes signed Certificate of Authenticity, edition card, and bookplate adhered to front endpaper. Originally published London: Sceptre, 2008 (as The Other Hand); New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009 (as Little Bee).

Chris Cleave (b. 1973) studied experimental psychology at Balliol College, Oxford, then worked as a journalist for the Daily Telegraph before publishing his debut novel Incendiary in 2005. Little Bee — published in Britain under the title The Other Hand — was his second, and the book that made his international reputation. Publishers on both sides of the Atlantic employed an unusual marketing strategy: reviewers were asked not to reveal the twist that arrives early in the novel, on the grounds that the reader's experience of discovery was part of the work's power. The approach was effective. The novel became a number one New York Times bestseller and a major book club phenomenon, read and discussed by millions of readers worldwide.

The novel has two narrators, whose voices alternate. Little Bee is a sixteen-year-old Nigerian girl who has survived an oil company massacre of her village in the Niger Delta and made her way to Britain, where she has spent two years in an immigration detention centre. Sarah O'Rourke is a British magazine editor whose marriage is in crisis, whose husband has recently died, and who receives a visit from Little Bee on the day after his funeral. The connection between the two women reaches back to a beach in Nigeria where they first met, and to a decision made in a moment of extreme and violent pressure whose consequences neither has escaped.

Cleave is a novelist of the socially engaged British tradition — his books attend to the political and humanitarian dimensions of the worlds they occupy without sacrificing character or narrative — and Little Bee handles the refugee experience with an intimacy and an urgency that journalism rarely achieves. The novel was shortlisted for the Costa Award. Cleave's subsequent novels include Gold (2012) and Everyone Brave Is Forgiven (2016), the latter drawing on his grandfather's experiences during the Second World War.

Near fine. Some minor loss to cover gilt; contents fine throughout.

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Catalogue Number: HH000541