Little Bee (35 page)

THANKS TO ANDY PATERSON
and Olivia Paterson for excellent notes on my
early draft.
Thanks
to Sharon Maguire and Anand Tucker for their warmth and support.

Thanks
also to Bob Hughes, Teresa Hayter, and Christine Bacon for their hospitality,
their encouragement, and for reading my manuscript and offering suggestions.

I
owe a great deal to Suzie Dooré, Jennifer Joel, Maya Mavjee, Marysue Rucci, and
Peter Straus, whose several patient readings and insightful editorial notes on
my drafts have been invaluable. Thank you.

CHRIS CLEAVE IS A
novelist and a columnist for
The Guardian
newspaper in London.

His
bestselling novel,
Incendiary,
was published in
twenty countries, won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award, was short-listed for the
2006 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, won the United States Book-of-the-Month
Club’s First Fiction Award, and won the Prix Spécial du Jury at the French Prix
des Lecteurs 2007.

Inspired
by his early childhood in West Africa and by an accidental visit to a British
concentration camp,
Little Bee
is his second novel.

He
lives in London with his French wife and two mischievous Anglo-French children.

He
keeps his website at
www.chriscleave.com
.

1.
Home Office UK Border Agency; see
http://www.bia.homeoffice.gov.uk/managingborders/immigrationremovalcentres/.