British writer and journalist Chris Cleave takes on the plight of an illegal Nigerian refugee in his second novel, Little Bee. (Random House)

"Most days," sighs the narrator in Chris Cleave's new novel, Little Bee, "I wish I was a British pound coin instead of an African girl." As far as pipe dreams go, it's as idiosyncratic as it is impossible. And as far as opening gambits go, it's a subtle yet calculated toss of the gauntlet.

'We're often told that we live in a globalized world, and we talk about it all the time, but people don't stop to think about what it means.'

—Author Chris Cleave

Nominated for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers' Prize, Little Bee is an elegantly written story about the unexpected connections between seemingly random people and places. Alternately funny and tragic, it explores how the life of a Nigerian teenager seeking asylum in London (the titular Little Bee) becomes bound up with that of a posh Brit named Sarah, the editor of an offbeat women's magazine and mother of a four-year-old boy.

Their bond is the result of an incident so horrific it defies language; I had to put the book down for a bit while reading that section. Though the trauma happens in a far-off place, the aftershock follows the characters as they move forward, rattling bourgeois Sarah's cozy domestic sphere. This, Little Bee cheekily tells us, is called "globalization."

"We're often told that we live in a globalized world, and we talk about it all the time, but people don't stop to think about what it means," explains Cleave in a recent phone interview. "I used the word very deliberately. It's half true – money can move freely across national borders, but people can't. They're actively prevented from going where the money is. Capital is global, but labour isn't.

"I believe that's the cause of two major crises that we're involved in as a species – one is a financial crisis and one is a refugee crisis. Imagine a world where money can't move, where capital is stuck in its country of origin, but people can freely move where the work is! That's an alternate interpretation of globalization that would solve a lot of problems. I didn't want to get too heavy in the book, but it's about refugees, so I felt like it was important to get some of this stuff across."

The British novelist strives to tackle grand political issues on a microcosmic level. His first book, Incendiary (2005), took the form of an open letter to Osama bin Laden written by a bereaved working-class woman whose husband and young son were killed by a terrorist attack in London. (In a bizarre twist of fate, Cleave had the misfortune of releasing Incendiary on July 7, 2005: the day of the London bombing.)

(Random House Canada)

For Cleave, the idea is to bring the big picture into sharp, human focus. Chaos theory – the idea that a tiny gesture can bring about a cavalcade of change – forms a quiet undercurrent in his writing. Often, the catalysts are literally the tiniest figures in his stories – young children unaware of the effects their actions have on those around them. In Little Bee, Sarah's preschool-aged son, Charlie, "conjures above his weight," as Cleave puts it.

"He's the reason to care, isn't he? He's the reason they don't all just walk away from each other. And he does that by just being honest and straightforward and being himself. That's one of the reasons I'm so optimistic about people," Cleave adds. "That they naturally do respond to innocence."

A kid's-eye-view of the world is something Cleave knows well. In a regular column on parenting for London's Guardian newspaper, he describes his relationship with his two sons in loving detail.

"The thing that really pushed my switch as a writer was having kids," he says. "Before that, I didn't really have a focus or thoughts in my head. Now, I'm not saying that everyone should have kids – people have a bunch of different experiences that flip that switch. A good friend of mine is a cancer survivor; that's what it took for her to see the world in a different way. For another person I know, it was a car crash. But becoming a parent gives you a sense that intimate and domestic things are actually amazing.

"For a two-year-old, taking his dummy [pacifier] away can be psychologically shattering – it's the hugest thing happening in his week, even if in the rest of the world, we're shattered by the banks collapsing and chaos in Gaza. Children have a different idea of what's important, and I want to take the approach that an event is no less important because it's very local."

It may seem odd that a man so consumed by global issues in his fiction tackles intimately domestic concerns as a journalist, but Cleave insists that small characters can elucidate universal truths.

"In Incendiary," he explains, "the life of this little boy was a way of talking about very big ideas – jihad and the war on terror. Little Bee represents the global movement of people fleeing from horror."

Similarly, small details in the text are significant because of how they echo parts of the bigger picture. Young Charlie, clad in a ratty Batsuit, only answers to "Batman." He clings to these trappings because they represent a safe world where good triumphs over evil and the "baddies" are always slain. While the four-year-old wonders whether he's actually a superhero, Little Bee realizes that no matter how well she speaks the Queen's English, she'll never obscure her Nigerian identity.

(Anchor Canada)

As a privileged, English-speaking white man from a very rich nation, Cleave knows he could be accused of cultural appropriation. In Little Bee, it's not just that he tries to imagine the life of an oppressed individual from a developing nation; it's that he works to convey the voice of a 14-year-old Nigerian girl who mimics upper-crust British dialect. Cleave knows his storytelling strategies are controversial; he's sheepish about crossing lines, but he readily defends his choices. He insists that the ability to imagine other points of view is part of what makes us human.

"As a writer, you're crazy if you don't think about that quite hard," he says. "Do I as an Englishman have any right to write a story of a Nigerian woman? I dealt with that by thinking that I wanted to tell the story about people who have nothing coming to a place where people basically have everything, and asking, 'Can you help?' It's a story of crossing borderlines, and the only way I could make that story true – the best mechanism for telling it – was to show both sides of it."

To accomplish this, Cleave researched the speech patterns and background stories of his characters, conducting interviews with actual asylum seekers, a psychiatrist who specialized in the trauma experienced by child refugees, illegal immigrants and members of London's Nigerian community, who helped him shape the musicality, quirks and cadences of Little Bee's speech.

"I completely sympathize with the people who say I have no right to do this," Cleave offers. "My only excuse is that I do it well."

The characters in Little Bee who hew closest to Cleave's own experience are also the least likeable. They are two men who both hold Little Bee's life in the balance in different ways, at different points in the story. One of them is Sarah's husband, Andrew, a champagne socialist who writes op-ed pieces; he's an ordinary guy with self-righteous beliefs who comes up slightly short when he's tested by real life. Civil servant Lawrence, on the other hand, is a cowardly yes-man for whom "career and propriety are more important than basic morality. He's gone so far down that road," Cleave sighs, "that he can't come back, and he's made more villainous for all the things he could do but doesn't."

Three-quarters of the way through Little Bee, there's a moment where it seems like the story is marching toward a neat, comforting ending. But then Cleave gently swerves toward something less pat and more disconcerting. While the choice may make Little Bee less satisfying on a gut level, it speaks to Cleave's awareness that even the most beautifully written novel has only a minute effect on global understanding and change.

"As humans, we have a duty to try and understand each other's stories," he says. "What makes you you isn't ethnicity or educational background or where you come from. They're three simple things: what was the worst day of your life, what was the best day of your life and what's the dream you still hold on to. If I can try and understand that about people, I understand that as my life, too. I don't have any nobler goal as a writer – it's just that, to try to understand myself and my own motivation."

Little Bee is in stores now.

Sarah Liss writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.