The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd new softcover book

THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES

by SUE MONK KIDD

See other Fiction and Modern Classics at The Bookshelf of Oz click here

New softcover book, 302 pages, plus a 15-page Readers Guide.

Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily's fierce-hearted "stand-in mother," Rosaleen, insults three of the town's fiercest racists, Lily decides they should both escape to Tiburon, South Carolina - a town that holds the secret to her mother's past. There they are taken in by an eccentric trio of black beekeeping sisters who introduce Lily to a mesmerizing world of bees, honey, and the Black Madonna who presides over their household. This is a remarkable story about divine female power and the transforming power of love - a story that women will share and pass on to their daughters for years to come.

The Secret Life of Bees has sold more than 5 million copies, spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list and been published in 35 countries. It was awarded the 2004 Book Sense Paperback book of the Year, nominated for the Orange Prize in England, and chosen as Good Morning America's Read This! Book Club pick. Taught widely now in college and high school classrooms, The Secret Life of Bees is fast becoming a modern classic. It has been produced on stage in New York by The American Place Theater and been adapted into a movie, due for release in late 2008.

About the Author

Sue Monk Kidd (born August 12, 1948), author of the highly acclaimed memoirs The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits, has won a Poets & Writers award, a Katherine Anne Porter Award, and a Bread Loaf scholarship. Two of her short stories - including an excerpt from The Secret Life of Bees - were selected as notable stories in Best American Short Stories. The Secret Life of Bees was nominated for the prestigious Orange Prize for fiction in England.

Sue was born and raised in the tiny town of Sylvester, Georgia, a place that deeply influenced the writing of her first novel The Secret Life of Bees. She discovered her desire to be a writer as a child, listening to her father's imaginative stories.Two books, which she read at the age of fifteen- Thoreau's spiritual memoir, Walden and Kate Chopin's novel, The Awakening- had a deep impact on her and would foreshadow the course she herself would eventually take as a writer: writing spiritual memoir and novels.
She is currently Writer in Residence at Phoebe Pember House in Charleston, where she lives with her husband, Sanford (Sandy) Kidd, two children, Bob and Ann, and a black lab, Lily.

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd