Little Bee is a survivor with a strange name, introduced to the reader as she is being illegally set free from a horrific refugee detention centre in the English countryside. She escaped Nigeria after her village was destroyed because it stood in the way of oil interests. Her story, and that of the people she comes to see in England, is depressing.

The teenage girl, who learned “the Queen’s English” by reading newspapers in the detention centre, asks the reader for a favour at the beginning of the book, one that is almost impossible to fulfil. Looking at the small white scars covering the brown legs of a fellow asylum seeker, she asks that readers no longer consider scars ugly — that is what the makers of cuts want us to believe. “But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay?” They are signs that the bearer of those marks has survived. If that weren’t enough, Little Bee also asks that the reader takes the same view of her sad tale. “Sad words are just another beauty. A sad story means, this storyteller is alive.”

Chris Cleave alternates this beautifully depressing tale between the voices of Little Bee and Sarah O’Rourke, the founding editor of a trendy women’s magazine in London. She and her husband Andrew met Little Bee and her sister on a beach in Nigeria. A terrible encounter with soldiers looking for the two young girls on that beach ensured the lives of Andrew, Sarah and Little Bee would be linked — that they shared scars. The arrival of Little Bee in England years later is a shock that tears Sarah’s life apart. Cleave does an incredible job of writing this story with the voices of two women. His grasp of human nature and our wonky psychology transcends his gender.

We are taken into the lives of Sarah and her refugee visitor as they struggle to understand what happened to them and how to adjust to a new reality after Little Bee shows up at the doorstep of Sarah’s London home. This story delves into how people internalize the past and reflect on the future after tragedy strikes. Though the story could get mired in resentment, anger and depression, Cleave consistently moves the story and the characters forward. Little Bee is an incredible story of futility and of hope.