Chris Cleave

We don’t want to tell you too much about this book. It is a truly special story and we don’t want to spoil it. Nevertheless, you need to know something, so we will just say this: It is extremely funny, but the African beach scene is horrific. Once you have read it, you’ll want to tell everyone about it. When you do, please don’t tell them what happens. The magic is in how it unfolds. A note from the author I went to a concentration camp by mistake. As a student at Oxford University I’d take any paid work during the vacation, so one morning I climbed into a minibus with some other casual labourers, destination unknown. We passed through a razor-wire perimeter fence. Thin brown faces appeared in the morning mist. Fingers clawed the wire. The minibus dropped us into a crush of agitated people, pleading with us in half the languages on earth. Despair and confusion reigned. This terrible place was a removal centre for asylum seekers. We’d been hired to serve canteen meals to people being returned to the murderous regimes they’d fled. These were the people my country had decided it wouldn’t help. It was hard to look them in the eye. Everyone ate with plastic spoons. It would have been brave to provide people in their predicament with anything sharper. After detention in heartbreaking conditions, most would be forcibly deported to countries where many would be tortured and killed. Mass deportation continues to this day. It doesn’t take a genius to point out the parallel with the Holocaust. It doesn’t take a novelist to realise this isn’t terribly British. What was remarkable, though, was the stoicism and sheer grace of some of these doomed people. Years later, it was a humbling experience and a fierce delight to research this novel. The refugees I heard from brought me to unexpected discoveries: the beauty of Nigerian English and Jamaican English, the startling graveyard humour of refugees, and the moral courage of the many citizens who help asylum seekers, in defiance of their authorities. It’s an uplifting, thrilling, universal human story, and I just worked to keep it simple. One brave African girl; one brave Western woman. What if one just turned up on the other’s doorstep one misty morning and asked, Can you help? And what if that help wasn’t just a one-way street?

Little Bee

Cyclists Zoe and Kate are friends and athletic rivals for Olympic gold, while Kate and her husband Jack, also a world-class cyclist, must contend with the recurrence of their young daughter's leukemia.

A Novel

Gold

Distraught over the deaths of her husband and son in a suicide bombing at a London soccer match, a woman writes a letter to Osama bin Laden to persuade him to abandon his terror campaign and becomes embroiled in a psychological web of ambition, cynicism, and guilt that erodes her faith in society and pushes her to acts of extraordinary desperation as the city braces for another deadly bomb threat. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.

Incendiary

London, 1939. The day war is declared, Mary North goes to the War Office, signs up-- and is assigned to be a teacher to a class evacuated to the countryside. Tom Shaw ignores the war until his roommate Alistair Heath has enlisted. The three meet, and become tested in ways they could not have imagined, entangling their lives in violence and passion, shaping their hopes and dreams.

Everyone Brave is Forgiven

The stunning new novel from the author of INCENDIARY.

The Other Hand

Ali Smith

Marina Lewycka

Inua Ellams

Abdulrazak Gurnah

David Herd

Patience Agbabi

Stephen Collis

Carol Watts

Dragan Todorovic

Jade Amoli-Jackson

Avaes Mohammed

Hubert Moore

Michael Zand

Two unaccompanied children travel across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded boat that has been designed to only make it halfway across… A 63-year-old man is woken one morning by border officers ‘acting on a tip-off’ and, despite having paid taxes for 28 years, is suddenly cast into the detention system with no obvious means of escape… An orphan whose entire life has been spent in slavery – first on a Ghanaian farm, then as a victim of trafficking – writes to the Home Office for help, only to be rewarded with a jail sentence and indefinite detention… These are not fictions. Nor are they testimonies from some distant, brutal past, but the frighteningly common experiences of Europe’s new underclass – its refugees. While those with ‘citizenship’ enjoy basic human rights (like the right not to be detained without charge for more than 14 days), people seeking asylum can be suspended for years in Kafka-esque uncertainty. Here, poets and novelists retell the stories of individuals who have direct experience of Britain’s policy of indefinite immigration detention. Presenting their accounts anonymously, as modern day counterparts to the pilgrims’ stories in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this book offers rare, intimate glimpses into otherwise untold suffering.

Refugee Tales

Presents a tale of a precarious friendship between an illegal Nigerian refugee and a recent widow from suburban London, a story told from the alternating and disparate perspectives of both women.

José Vieira de Lima

Pequena Abelha

Kücük Ari

النحلة الصغيرة

The instant New York Times bestseller from Chris Cleave—the unforgettable novel about three lives entangled during World War II, told “with dazzling prose, sharp English wit, and compassion…a powerful portrait of war’s effects on those who fight and those left behind” (People, Book of the Week). London, 1939. The day war is declared, Mary North leaves finishing school unfinished, goes straight to the War Office, and signs up. Tom Shaw decides to ignore the war—until he learns his roommate Alistair Heath has unexpectedly enlisted. Then the conflict can no longer be avoided. Young, bright, and brave, Mary is certain she’d be a marvelous spy. When she is—bewilderingly—made a teacher, she finds herself defying prejudice to protect the children her country would rather forget. Tom, meanwhile, finds that he will do anything for Mary. And when Mary and Alistair meet, it is love, as well as war, that will test them in ways they could not have imagined, entangling three lives in violence and passion, friendship, and deception, inexorably shaping their hopes and dreams. The three are drawn into a tragic love triangle and—as war escalates and bombs begin falling—further into a grim world of survival and desperation. Set in London during the years of 1939–1942, when citizens had slim hope of survival, much less victory; and on the strategic island of Malta, which was daily devastated by the Axis barrage, Everyone Brave is Forgiven features little-known history and a perfect wartime love story inspired by the real-life love letters between Chris Cleave’s grandparents. This dazzling novel dares us to understand that, against the great theater of world events, it is the intimate losses, the small battles, the daily human triumphs that change us most.

A terrorist attack on Highbury stadium - a woman grieving for her husband and son - a first novel destined to set the literary world alight. Not since Alex Garland's The Beach has there been a first novel by a young male writer so guaranteed to arrest readers' attention by being of the moment, keep them hooked with the tension of its plotting, and feed their minds with its portrait of a distopian society. And yet Cleave has dared to do in a novel what Garland has only done on celluloid in 28 Days Later. He has created an extraordinary portrait of London paralysed with fear after a massive terrorist attack - and, even more extraordinary, he has done so from the point of view of a woman. Highbury Stadium has been turned into an inferno by eleven suicide bombers during an Arsenal-Chelsea match. Our narrator has lost both her husband and her four-year-old son, so she writes a letter to Osama Bin Laden to tell him exactly what she thinks. She doesn't know about commas. She comes from Bethnal Green and hasn't had much education. But, being from the East End, her family has been bombed before and she thinks that Osama should know what it feels like. chilling picture of London under siege (with barrage balloons to stop low-flying aircraft and a midnight curfew), and also a savage dissection of the British class system. Because, although the death of her husband tears her apart, our narrator wasn't a saint. She had become embroiled in a posh bloke from across the street who sought in her 'realness' something he couldn't find at home, and got more than he bargained for...

Altin

Kundakci

Não queremos lhe contar o que acontece nesse livro. É realmente uma história especial, e não queremos estragá-la. Ainda assim, você precisa saber algo para se interessar, por isso vamos dizer apenas o seguinte: Essa é a história de duas mulheres cujas vidas se chocam num dia fatídico. Então, uma delas precisa fazer uma escolha que envolve vida ou morte. Dois anos mais tarde, elas se reencontram. E tudo começa... Depois de ler esse livro, você vai querer comentá-lo com seus amigos. Quando o fizer, por favor, não lhes diga o que acontece. O encanto está sobretudo na maneira como a narrativa se desenrola. Pequena Abelha é o segundo livro de Chris Cleave. Finalista do Prêmio Costa de 2008 como Melhor Obra de Ficção, foi indicado ao Prêmio Commonwealth Writers' como Melhor Livro de 2009.

Pequena abelha

I coraggiosi saranno perdonati

Kate und Zoe: Sportlerinnen, Konkurrentinnen und Freundinnen. Seit sie sich vor vierzehn Jahren für das englische Nationalteam der Radrennfahrer beworben haben, sind sie eng befreundet. So unterschiedlich sie auch sind, wissen sie doch, dass sie sich auf ihre Freundschaft verlassen können. Jetzt steht der entscheidende Wettkampf ihrer Karriere bevor. Sie sind die Besten im Land – aber wer ist die Bessere von ihnen beiden? In dieser aufgeladenen Situation kommt es zu einer Auseinandersetzung, die alles in Frage stellt. Es geht um Sophie, Kates kleine Tochter, die schwer krank ist. Und um ein Geheimnis, das seit Jahren zwischen ihnen steht und immer schwerer auf ihnen beiden lastet. Sollte es jemals enthüllt werden, wäre nichts in ihrem Leben mehr so, wie es war ...

Roman

Възпламеняване

Goud vertelt het verhaal van Kate Argall en Zoe Castle, wielrenners op de baan, die al zo lang ze elkaar kennen elkaars beste vriendinnen zijn - en elkaars grootste rivalen. Ze hebben in hun sportieve carrière lief en leed met elkaar gedeeld, hebben van elkaar gewonnen en verloren, hebben elkaar verraden en vergeven. Nu, aan de vooravond van de Olympische Spelen van 2012 in Londen, staan ze, samen met hun beider coach Tom en met Sophie, de achtjarige, ernstig zieke dochter van de Argalls, voor hun grootste uitdaging. Na zijn grote succes Kleine Bij verrast Chris Cleave de wereld opnieuw met een schitterend, diep ontroerend verhaal over vriendschap, liefde, tragedie en verlossing. Vier volwassen mensen krijgen ieder voor zich te maken met een vrijwel onoplosbare vraag: wat ben je bereid op te offeren voor je beste vriend, als dat betekent dat je het allerbelangrijkste in je leven moet opgeven? Chris Cleave (1973) brak in 2008 internationaal door met zijn tweede roman, Kleine Bij, het betoverende verhaal over een zestienjarige asielzoekster uit Nigeria, een moeder uit Engeland en het geheim dat hen bindt. Kleine Bij wordt binnenkort verfilmd door Nicole Kidman, die ook de hoofdrol zal spelen. 'Cleave gaat voor het goud en brengt het thuis in deze ongelooflijk spannende en emotioneel geslaagde roman. Hij trekt alle registers open om in de harten en zielen van zijn innemende, veelzijdige personages te komen. De wielrenscènes zijn van een bijna lichamelijke intensiteit, die de lezer ademloos achterlaat. Van start tot finish is dit een literaire prestatie van waarlijk Olympisch niveau.' publishers weekly, starred review 'Cleave heeft de gave om complexe kinderen te portretteren die de diepste gevoelens oproepen.' kirkus reviews, starred review Over Kleine Bij: 'Zonder twijfel het beste boek van het jaar.' metro 'Fantastisch boek. Mooi, prachtige dialogen, grappig, maar ook ontroerend met fantastische wendingen.' paul de leeuw

Chris Cleave

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