London as a Safe Haven? Asylum, Immigration and Missing Fingers in Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand (2008) and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North (2009)

Abstract

The years 2008 and 2009 saw the publication of, respectively, Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand (published in the US and Canada under the alternative title Little Bee) and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North, two celebrated novels that take young asylum seekers of African origin living in London as narrator-protagonists. Each received a good deal of critical praise. While sales of The Other Hand were initially slow — the novel had no advertising and very little marketing, and sold around three thousand copies in 2008 — its sales increased dramatically over time and, as of February 2014, has sold more than half a million copies in the UK alone.1 It has also proven popular in the United States; in March 2010, it spent three weeks at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list for paperback fiction.2 It was short-listed for both the 2008 Costa Novel Award and the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and a number of companies expressed interest in making a screen adaptation of the novel and made offers accordingly; BBC Films eventually acquired the rights and an adaptation may yet surface. In contrast, while Harare North was critically acclaimed and was long-listed for the George Orwell Book Prize 2010, as of February 2014 it has sold just two thousand copies in the UK.3 Chikwava’s debut novel deserves to sell a great many more copies.