Excerpt from Little Bee by Chris Cleave, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

My big sister Nkiruka, she became a woman in the growing season, under the African sun, and who can blame her if the great red heat of it made her giddy and flirtatious? Who could not lean back against the doorpost of their house and smile with quiet indulgence when they saw my mother sitting her down to say, Nkiruka, beloved one, you must not smile at the older boys like that?

Me, I was a woman under white fluorescent strip lights, in an underground room in an immigration detention center forty miles east of London. There were no seasons there. It was cold, cold, cold, and I did not have anyone to smile at. Those cold years are frozen inside me. The African girl they locked up in the immigration detention center, poor child, she never really escaped. In my soul she is still locked up in there, forever, under the fluorescent lights, curled up on the green linoleum floor with her knees tucked up under her chin. And this woman they released from the immigration detention center, this creature that I am, she is a new breed of human. There is nothing natural about me. I was born - no, I was reborn - in captivity. I learned my language from your newspapers, my clothes are your castoffs, and it is your pound that makes my pockets ache with its absence. Imagine a young woman cut out from a smiling Save the Children magazine advertisement, who dresses herself in threadbare pink clothes from the recycling bin in your local supermarket car park and speaks English like the leader column of The Times, if you please. I would cross the street to avoid me. Truly, this is the one thing that people from your country and people from my country agree on. They say, That refugee girl is not one of us. That girl does not belong. That girl is a halfling, a child of an unnatural mating, an unfamiliar face in the moon.

So, I am a refugee, and I get very lonely. Is it my fault if I do not look like an English girl and I do not talk like a Nigerian? Well, who says an English girl must have skin as pale as the clouds that float across her summers? Who says a Nigerian girl must speak in fallen English, as if English had collided with Ibo, high in the upper atmosphere, and rained down into her mouth in a shower that half-drowns her and leaves her choking up sweet tales about the bright African colors and the taste of fried plantain? Not like a storyteller, but like a victim rescued from the flood, coughing up the colonial water from her lungs?

Excuse me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come to talk to you about the bright African colors. I am a born-again citizen of the developing world, and I will prove to you that the color of my life is gray. And if it should be that I secretly love fried plantain, then that must stay between us and I implore you to tell no one. Okay?

The morning they let us out of the detention center, they gave us all our possessions. I held mine in a see-through plastic bag. A Collins Gem Pocket English Dictionary, one pair of gray socks, one pair of gray briefs, and one United Kingdom Drivers License that was not mine, and one water-stained business card that was not mine either. If you want to know, these things belonged to a white man called Andrew O'Rourke. I met him on a beach.

This small plastic bag is what I was holding in my hand when the detention officer told me to go and stand in the queue for the telephone. The first girl in the queue, she was tall and she was pretty. Her thing was beauty, not talking. I wondered which of us had made the best choice to survive. This girl, she had plucked her eyebrows out and then she had drawn them back on again with a pencil. This is what she had done to save her life. She was wearing a purple dress, an A-line dress with pink stars and moons in the pattern. She had a nice pink scarf wrapped around her hair, and purple flip-flops on her feet. I was thinking she must have been locked up a very long time in our detention center. One has to go through a very great number of the charity boxes, you will understand, to put together an outfit that is truly an ensemble.

Copyright 2008 by Chris Cleave. Originally published as The Other Hand in Great Britain in 2008 by Sceptre, an imprint of Hodder & Stoughton.