Product Description

The stunning new novel from the author of INCENDIARY (20090215)

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #468 in Books
• Published on: 2009-02-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Review
'A powerful piece of art... shocking, exciting and deeply affecting...[a] superb novel... Besides sharp, witty dialogue, an emotionally charged plot and the vivid characters' ethical struggles, THE OTHER HAND delivers a timely challenge to reinvigorate our notions of civilized decency.' (Independent 20080809)

'Exquisitely balanced between terrible sadness and brilliant humour.' (Observer 20080823)

'Big themes, high emotion and cliffhangers aplenty... an enormously affecting investigation of love, guilt and global responsibility, told with a bittersweet urgency.' (Justine Jordan, Guardian 20080804)

'Searingly eloquent.' (Daily Mail 20090201)

'An ambitious and fearless gallop from the jungles of Africa via a shocking encounter on a Nigerian beach to the media offices of London and domesticity in leafy suburbia...Cleave immerses the reader in the worlds of his characters with an unshakable confidence. ' (Lawrence Norfolk, Guardian 20080803)

'totally believable... the author has a knack of explaining human suffering... I look forward to his next offering.' (Daily Express 20080828)

'impresses as a feat of literary engineering... the plot exerts a fearsome grip.' (Daily Telegraph 20080320)

'An exhilarating, disturbing read.' (James Urquhart, Independent (Books of the Year) 20080320)

'You stay in thrall to the bittersweet end.' (Scotland on Sunday 20090215)

'It would be hard not to romp through it.' (Financial Times 20080728)

'By turns funny, sad and shocking' (Sainsburys Magazine 20090224)

'The next Kite Runner.' (Library Journal 20090224)

'Warm, witty and beautifully written.' (Sunday Tribune )

'In a novel that tackles serious and uncomfortable subject matter, Cleave's writing makes one laugh and despair in equal measure. (4 stars)' (Time Out )

'I felt the same excitement discovering this as I did Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and Paul Torday's Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. There is an urgency here, an inability to put it down and a deep sense of loss once finished. It is a very special book indeed. Profound, deeply moving and yet light in touch, it explores the nature of loss, hope, love and identity with atrocity its backdrop. Read it and think deeply.' (Sarah Broadhurst, Bookseller )

'Immensely readable and moving . . . an affecting story of human triumph'

(New York Times )

'Artfully plotted... [a] strong yarn.' (Sunday Telegraph )

'A better book than Chris Cleave’s THE OTHER HAND may be published this year, but I wouldn’t bet on it. This exquisitely written story of a Nigerian refugee and a British glossy magazine editor is the most powerful novel I’ve read in a long time. . . it’s also a very funny book about brave, funny people who the reader quickly grows to love. . . But the heart of the book is Little Bee; naïve yet insightful and sophisticated, damaged yet capable of great courage and humour, she is an unforgettable character. I finished THE OTHER HAND in tears, and I still can’t get it out of my head. Just read it.' (The Gloss )

'Will blow you away... the best kind of political novel: You're almost entirely unaware of its politics because the book doesn't deal in abstractions but in human beings.' (Washington Post )

'So far it’s the best book of 2009, no question.' (Metro (US) )

From the Author
I went to a concentration camp by mistake. I climbed into a minibus with half a dozen other casual labourers and they bussed us off at dawn, destination unknown. I was a student; this was a summer job. The previous day we'd been sanitising toilets. The day before that we'd painted an underpass in child-friendly colours. My hands were still flecked with cerulean blue.

They waved us through a razor-wire perimeter fence, and then another and another. We were asking each other, why the high security? What are we daubing in bright colours today - Britain's nuclear deterrent? Now thin brown people appeared through the grey mist, fingers clawing the wire, imploring us as we passed. The minibus stopped and we were pushed through a crush of anxious men, pleading and remonstrating in half the languages on earth.

The place was Campsfield House Immigration Removal Centre and it turned out we were there to serve canteen meals to dead men walking. True story. I spent the next three days slapping down scoops of mashed potato onto the plastic plates of Somalis, Sierra Leonians and others so traumatised that their nationalities could not be ascertained. The asylum seekers ate with plastic spoons. It would have been brave to provide men in their predicament with anything sharper.

I learned that there are nearly a dozen concentration camps in Britain today. The Home Office calls them `immigration removal centres' and I guess, since they pay for the razor wire and the plastic spoons, they get to call them what they like. The inmates are rounded up in dawn raids, having committed no evil other than to flee for their lives and seek asylum in the UK, which they are legally entitled to do. After detention in heartbreaking conditions, thousands each year are deported to countries where it is well known that many will be tortured and killed. Forgive me, but this thing we do to preserve Britain's character - it doesn't seem terribly British.

I wrote this novel because of two people I met in that place. The first, an Angolan, showed me a tiny photograph of his daughter. He said, She will starve if they deport me. Can you help? Both of us were crying. What could I do? I asked him if he wanted the carrots or the peas.

The second person, arriving at the head of the canteen queue, told me the following joke in his mellifluous Nigerian English: An asylum seeker goes to a nice hotel and he asks the barman, Sir, can you recommend me a fine port? And the barman says, Yes, Dover, now fuck off back home!

And somehow, in that terrible place, we were laughing.

I wrote those two characters - the tragic and the defiantly funny - into one brave Nigerian girl, Little Bee. She turns up on the doorstep of a slightly lost English woman one morning and simply asks, Can you help? I wanted to explore whether two such souls could save one other. I wanted to discover where, in our world and in the human heart, a person could truly find refuge. I hope you will enjoy the novel.

About the Author
Chris Cleave’s debut novel INCENDIARY was an international bestseller published in 20 countries. It won the Somerset Maugham Award, the US Book-of-the-Month Club’s First Fiction award and the Prix Spécial du Jury at the French Prix des Lecteurs, was shortlisted for the 2006 Commonwealth Writers Prize, and is now a major motion picture.
 
Inspired by his early childhood in West Africa, THE OTHER HAND is Chris Cleave’s second novel. He is married with two children, and lives in London. He keeps a website at www.chriscleave.com. (20081213)

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Customer Reviews

Great story, patchy prose
This book has floated a lot of boats mainly, I suspect, because the story is so powerful. Emotive, provocative and challenging, this is a tragic human tale with much contemporary relevance, and I'm glad I managed to fight my way through the frequently ungainly prose and clunking dialogue to the fine conclusion.
At times this novel read like an early draft, not a finished work. Many sentences made me recoil and try to mentally reorganise them. (Interestingly, the first chapter was the best written. And the last too. An editor's prioritising at work here?) Some sections were very cliche-prone, others too purple. Chapter 8, for example: "I remember the exact day when England became me, when its contours cleaved to the curves of my own body, when its inclinations became my own." This is nauseating guff, and the passage gets worse, straining for literary merit, missing by a mile.
The Other Hand could, I think, make a powerful film, if offered to a screenwriter with more of a gift for natural sounding speech. The conversation between Sarah and Andrew on the Nigerian beach is typically tin-eared, beginning: "Listen to that surf, Andrew. It's so unbelievably peaceful here." "I'm still a bit scared, frankly. We should go back inside the hotel compound." (Something bad about to happen then?)
Alternating the story-telling between Sarah and Little Bee was generally effective, but about halfway through it could probably have been dispensed with altogether as a narrative device. I felt that Cleave was tying himself in expositional knots once the two characters were actually under the same roof.
If I found much to criticise, my hostility to the writing style was no doubt increased by the sensational reviews associated with the promotion of this book. These rather oddly stressed how funny the book was, despite the heavy subject matter. Not much made me laugh though.
I must repeat that this is a great story, full of unexpected turns, and it will definitely stay with me. I await the inevtable film with interest.

It doesn't add up
I have very mixed feelings about "The Other Hand". Like other reviewers, I found the gushing "Foreword" by Chris Cleave's editor very annoying. Anything that starts with "Dear Reader, You don't know me..." would normally guarantee my giving the book a wide berth. But the hard-backed copy I have was "passed on" to me by a relative, so I thought I would give it the benefit of the doubt. Although Nanny Publisher has told us not to spill the beans, I'm afraid I may have let the odd little spoiler into the review below.

The cover and design of the book is bewildering, given the general subject matter and tone. The silhouettes of the parrot (for Little Bee) and the squirrel (for Sarah) at the start of the chapters are almost twee (although these would be lovely in a children's book).I found it disconcerting for these to head chapters full of some pretty violent and gory scenes, as well as crude language.

The writing is patchy. There are some moments of intelligent, inventive writing, but sometimes the author seems too desperate in his search for a new viewpoint or a new metaphor. One example that I found unintentionally hilarious was where Sarah is about to embark on an affair. She stares at the carpet tiles in her (imminent) future lover's office:
"I can still see them now, with hyper-real clarity, every minute grey acrylic fibre of them, gleaming in the fluorescent light, coarse and glossy and tightly curled, lascivious, obscene, the grey pubic fuzz of an ageing administrative body." Come on...carpet tiles?

The book's strengths are in its theme and the characterisation of Little Bee. The early chapters, which introduce Little Bee's viewpoint on England and her release from the detention centre with an intriguing and entertaining group of fellow refugees, are super and really live up to the "compelling/stunning" reviews.

However, from the pivotal beach scene onwards, everything seems to fall apart. I began to lose interest, particularly in Sarah and her two highly-flawed men because their motives and reactions to events seemed increasingly unbelievable and unlikely. Having suffered the scare of nearly losing her child, would Sarah really have taken him along to a troubled and dangerous country?

Overall, the book is worth reading as it tackles an interesting issue and the opening chapters are superb. But it is let down by not being thought-through enough and from the appalling hype of the publishers.

the flaws don't spoil an otherwise great book
NB. spoilers in this review!

I think the main flaw with this book has nothing to do with the story itself but the marketing techiques employed by the publishers. As other reviewers have mentioned, the blur could basically be summarised as: 'This book is sooo amazing we could not possibly do it justice in a blurb and you must buy it to find out' and it is precisely this which has led to the the negativity surrounding the book. It cannot possibly live up to hype like this. Any flaws (and all books have them) are grossly amplified in the reader's mind simply because of the arrogance of the back cover. This is only made worse by the gushing letter from the editor.

Take the letter away and stick a normal blurb on the back and what you are left with is a flawed, but rather wonderful, novel.

I don't like criticising good novels but in order to give a balanced review I will get the few faults out of the way first.
- the beach scene. Although compelling reading, this scene is destroyed by the lack of logic. It screams 'plot device', with the characters being pushed along a certain course of action by the author - a course of action they would definitely not take. If the killers were so desperate to get rid of witnesses to their crime - so much so to track them down over such a long period - they would not have let Little Bee live simply because of the actions of a stranger. This wouldn't matter greatly if the scene wasn't so crucial to the entire story.
- the ending. Awful, awful. Not only are we left hanging after following Little Bee for so long, but again there is a comprehensive lack of logic. Why why WHY would Sarah bring Charlie to a country she knows first hand to be extremely dangerous? Especially after coming so close to losing him. Which leads me onto my next point...
- Charlie. I'm sure he's a very realistic kid but the incorrect grammar/batman obsession becomes very irritating. The incorrect grammar can be hinted at occasionally for humour. Less is more.

Right, onto the good points (and they really are very good):
- the characterisation. Contrary to other reviewers, I thought this was excellent: the characters were sympathetic enough for us to care, flawed enought to be realistic. Except for the incidents mentioned above, I thought their actions were very realistic and consistent with their internal logic.
- the insight into a refugee's life. I have always been very sympathetic to assylum seekers, but this intensified my feelings. Everyone ought to read this book and then see if they are so judgmental of immigrants.
- the language. Contrary to virtually every other reviewer, I thought the language was beautiful and simple.
- the humour. Considering the subject matter, this novel is surpisingly witty and this helps to balance the rather grim scenes.

In summary, this book is compelling, moving, tragic, horrific, touching and funny. It is flawed like all novels, but please don't allowed the irritating marketing to ruin your perception of this beautiful story.