The Silver Apples Catering & Events Co
November Book Club At Silver Apples
Book club meets again on the first Tuesday in November – the 2nd – when we shall be discussing Chris Cleave's, "The Other Hand". 7.30 pm onwards and all welcome...
The Independent had the following to say about "The Other Hand" -
Chris Cleave's startling debut novel seemed to bleed art into reality. Incendiary detailed the human impact of a terrorist attack in a London football stadium and was published, with staggering coincidence, on 7 July 2005. Three years on, his follow-up takes some quotidian, overlooked realities – Britain's shameful treatment of asylum seekers, and the atrocities they might be fleeing – and forges a powerful piece of art. The Other Hand is shocking, exciting and deeply affecting in its evisceration of how one hideous event brings two alien cultures into collision: the lawless predation of an oil-frenzied corner of Nigeria, and the ordered suburbia of Kingston-upon-Thames.
The Guardian commented as follows:
The Other Hand is 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. Part-thriller, part-multicultural Aga saga, the book enmeshes its characters in the issues of immigration, globalisation, political violence and personal accountability. Lists of themes are often review-speak for "worthy but dull", but not in this case. Cleave immerses the reader in the worlds of his characters with an unshakable confidence that we will find them as gripping and vital as he does. Mostly, that confidence is justified.
The book begins in an immigration detention centre where Little Bee, a 16-year-old Ibo girl from Nigeria, has spent the last two years honing skills that point back to horrific past events and forward to a hoped-for future. Making herself look unattractive to men is the first of several mysterious threads that Cleave slowly winds in. Learning the Queen's English (from the quality broadsheets only, she specifies) has a more obvious relevance. "Excuse me for learning your language properly. I am here to tell you a real story. I did not come here to talk to you about the bright African colours."
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