The grandmother of all One City/One Book programs in the US, Seattle Reads, has chosen Chris Cleave’s Little Bee as their 2011 selection. The author, who lives in London, will come to Seattle for an appearance at the library in mid May.

Santa Monica selected the book in February of this year for their 2010 program (there’s an EarlyWord connection; Robert Graves, Public Services Librarian at Santa Monica Public Library generously credits EarlyWord as being the first place he heard about the book); the entire program, including a visit from Cleave, was a resounding success.

It hardly seems a coincidence that the trade paperback edition of the book went on the NYT best seller list the next month, where it’s remained in the top 4 ever since, rising to #1 for three weeks. The Seattle program may be having a similar effect; yesterday, the day after the announcement, the book  jumped up the Amazon sale rankings to #32, from #79 the day before.

Little Bee: A Novel Chris Cleave Retail Price: $14.00 Paperback: 304 pages Publisher: Simon & Schuster – (2010-02-16) ISBN / EAN: 1416589643 / 9781416589648

The audio, from Tantor, was on the “Best Audiobook of 2009” lists from both Library Journal and AudioFile.

Trade; 9781400111718; 9 Audio CD; $34.99
Library; 9781400141715; 9 Audio CD; $69.99
MP3; 9781400161713; 1 MP3-CD; $24.99

Chicago has also announced their pick, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (opening event, 9/7). San Francisco, has chosen Zeitoun by Dave Eggers (runs Sept thru Oct).

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 26th, 2010 at 9:05 am and is filed under One Book Programs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.