Sue Monk Kidd's fiction debut, The Secret Life of Bees, transformed the acclaimed memoirist into a literary superstar. With more than 3 million copies in print, The Secret Life of Bees has remained on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 73 weeks and a movie version is forthcoming from Universal Focus. Her much-anticipated second novel, The Mermaid Chair, is a vividly imagined portrait of one woman's awakening to the passions of the spirit and the ecstasies of the body.