Little Bee (The Other Hand) Characters

Meet the Cast

Little Bee

Sixteen-year-old Little Bee is a deeply ironic character. In her, the extremes of hope and horror live side-by-side. With every breath, she embraces life…while also waiting for death to find her,...

Sarah O'Rourke

Sarah, narrator of five of Little Bee's eleven chapters, is 32 years old when the novel opens in May 2007. She's married (unhappily) to Andrew O'Rourke and they have a four-year-old son, Charlie. S...

Charlie O'Rourke

Charlie is Sarah's four-year-old son, and he's reason enough to read this story. Before we dive into what we think of him, here are some good reference points from our beloved bookshelf. For one,...

Andrew O'Rourke

Andrew is a deeply tragic figure. He's Sarah's husband, Charlie's father, and a political columnist for The Times. We get the idea he isn't exactly happy even before he learns about Sarah and Lawre...

Lawrence Osborn

To cut to the chase, Lawrence is Sarah's lover. He also happens to work for the Home Office, the department of the British Government that handles immigration. He is married to Linda and has three...

Nkiruka

Nkiruka, whose name means "Future is Bright," is Little Bee's older sister, who takes on the name Kindness. Like Little Bee, Nkiruka flees her village when it's destroyed by oil company workers. Bu...

Yevette

Yevette is a Jamaican woman who is being held with Little Bee in Black Hill Immigration Removal Center. We don't learn Yevette's story, but we know that the parts of her body that are visible are c...

Sari Girl

Sari girl, whose real name we never learn, is one of the girls released from the detention center, along with Little Bee, Yevette, and the "girl with no name." We never learn sari girl's story beca...

The Girl With No Name

The girl with no name is released from the detention center with Little Bee, Yevette, and sari girl. For her, the release is an utter tragedy. We don't know what horrors she's running from, but Lit...

Aabirah

Aabirah is the girl with no name's daughter, who, we come to understand, is dead. In Mr. Ayers's shelter, the girl with no name begins hallucinating that her daughter is there with her. In a touchi...

The Girls Back Home

Little Bee often imagines how she would explain the things she experiences in England to her gal pals back home, from the Nigerian village where she lived before coming to England. Chris Cleave say...