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Also by Sue Monk Kidd:

The Book of Longings, April 2021
Trade Size / e-Book
The Book of Longings, May 2020
Hardcover / e-Book
The Invention Of Wings, January 2014
Hardcover / e-Book
Traveling with Pomegranates, September 2009
Paperback
The Secret Life of Bees, August 2008
Paperback
The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, January 2007
Hardcover
When the Heart Waits, November 2006
Paperback
Firstlight, October 2006
Hardcover
The Mermaid Chair, April 2005
Hardcover
The Secret Life of Bees, January 2003
Trade Size (reprint)
God's Joyful Surprise, March 1989
Paperback

THE MERMAID CHAIR
By: Sue Monk Kidd

On Egret Island, off the coast of South Carolina, a married woman is strongly attracted to a monk who is just months away from taking his final vows.

Viking
April 2005
352 pages
ISBN: 0670033944
EAN: 9780670033942
Hardcover
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Contemporary | Contemporary Women's Fiction

Sue Monk Kidd’s stunning debut, The Secret Life of Bees, has transformed her into a genuine literary star. Now, in her much-anticipated new novel, Kidd has woven a transcendent tale that will thrill her legion of fans and cement her reputation as one of the most remarkable writers at work today.

Inside the abbey of a Benedictine monastery on tiny Egret Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, resides a beautiful and mysterious chair ornately carved with mermaids and dedicated to a saint who, legend claims, was a mermaid before her conversion.

Jessie Sullivan’s conventional life has been "molded to the smallest space possible." So when she is called home to cope with her mother’s startling and enigmatic act of violence, Jessie finds herself relieved to be apart from her husband, Hugh. Jessie loves Hugh, but on Egret Island— amid the gorgeous marshlands and tidal creeks—she becomes drawn to Brother Thomas, a monk who is mere months from taking his final vows. What transpires will unlock the roots of her mother’s tormented past, but most of all, as Jessie grapples with the tension of desire and the struggle to deny it, she will find a freedom that feels overwhelmingly right.

What inspires the yearning for a soul mate? Few writers have explored, as Kidd does, the lush, unknown region of the feminine soul where the thin line between the spiritual and the erotic exists. The Mermaid Chair is a vividly imagined novel about the passions of the spirit and the ecstasies of the body; one that illuminates a woman’s self- awakening with the brilliance and power that only a writer of Kidd’s ability could conjure.