Little Bee is a great novel; powerful & interesting with a very resonant, beautiful, and likable main character. It somehow manages to be well-written in a literary sense while slicing a very world-aware social commentary into your gut. 
 But the literary value of the book is just not important in comparison to the fact that Little Bee is a true story - the narrative is fictional but the composite facts and stories that built and inspired the fiction are real. 
 Truth 1: Our use of oil means the brutalization and murder of entire villages. The oil companies order it when they find oil-rich land in Africa. Every effort is made to ensure there are no survivors to tell the tale. The oil companies that profit every time we fill up our tanks are the ones doing this. We HAVE to refuse to bear this, we must demand new technology & boycott our vehicles until then as much as we possibly can. There are conflict diamonds, conflict computers/cell phones, and all oil is conflict oil on a scale we can't even wrap our brains around when you include the big wars with the small-scale ones like those in Nigeria where Little Bee is from. 
 Truth 2: The refugees that come to our countries (running from the horror the elite of our countries cause) are kept imprisoned in "detention centers" for years before being shipped right back to the death they narrowly escaped in the first place. Thankfully the book and Chris Cleave's website have resources to learn more about and help refugees. 
 The author is a writer for The Guardian, one of the very last bastions of real journalism where you can actually get legitimate news and where the organization doesn't make a mockery of its name. So we get the benefit of his awareness in conveying the above truths (minus my editorializing of course) coupled with a well-told story of a young girl's life and her impact on one couple in the "civilized" UK with whom she has a life-changing chance meeting. This meeting results in a juxtaposition of our lives as Westerners with hers as a Nigerian refugee and shows how connected we are and suggests where hope for the future lies. 
 It was really a beautiful novel. It had some flaws and places where it dragged a bit but i gave it 5 stars b/c of the powerful story and the very competent telling of that story which was very successfully woven with the truth of the real cost of our Western way of life - truly remarkable for a novel. It is absolutely gut-wrenching while simultaneously having facets of hope, beauty, and humor. Very odd to end a book feeling both enlightened and decimated. I hope you read it and pass it on, i can say quite literally that people's lives depend upon it.