The Secret Life of Bees

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What to expect

Don't miss the extraordinary new novel from Sue Monk Kidd, The Book of Longings - published on 21st April 2020, and available to pre-order now.

Sue Monk Kidd's internationally bestselling first novel THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES has delighted many millions of readers around the world. 'Charming, funny, moving' The Times; 'A wonderful book, by turns sad, full of incident and shot through with grown-up magic reminiscent of Joanne Harris' Daily Telegraph

Lily has grown up believing she accidentally killed her mother when she was four. She not only has her own memory of holding the gun, but her father's account of the event. Now fourteen, she yearns for her mother, and for forgiveness. Living on a peach farm in South Carolina with her father, she has only one friend: Rosaleen, a black servant whose sharp exterior hides a tender heart. South Carolina in the sixties is a place where segregation is still considered a cause worth fighting for.

When racial tension explodes one summer afternoon, and Rosaleen is arrested and beaten, Lily is compelled to act. Fugitives from justice and from Lily's harsh and unyielding father, they follow a trail left by the woman who died ten years before. Finding sanctuary in the home of three beekeeping sisters, Lily starts a journey as much about her understanding of the world, as about the mystery surrounding her mother.

(P)2008 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

Moving, original, and accomplished ... wonderfully written, powerful, poignant, and humorous, and takes a line which is - refreshingly - strongly female without being cliche-feminist. It is also deliciously eccentric, which lifts it out of the usual category of a rite-of-passage novel into the realms of real distinction. Do read it
Joanna Trollope
Charming, funny, moving and unmistakeably from the American South... a story that whips together heat, violence, eccentricity, madness and the Gothic
The Times
This is a wonderful book, by turns funny, sad, full of incident and shot through with grown-up magic reminiscent of Joanne Harris.
The Daily Telegraph
Eccentric, inventive, and ultimately forgiving... a truly original Southern voice
Anita Shreve
Monk Kidd has created a narrative as skilful and sweet as a honeycomb. Uplifting and warm-hearted, this is a moving novel and Lily is a fascinating, funny and clever narrator
Literary Review
Sue Monk Kidd... Illuminates what is beautiful... THE SECRET LIFE OF BEES is a gift, filled with hope
Luanne Rice
This is the story of a young girl's journey toward healing, and of finding, at its end, not only wholeness, but the intrinsic sacredness of living in the world. I think it is simply wonderful
Anne Rivers Siddons
A wonderfully written debut novel
Kirkus Reviews
With imagination as lush and colorful as the American South, a clutch of deliciously eccentric characters, and vivid prose, Sue Monk Kidd creates a rich, maternal haven in a harsh world
Christina Schwarz
As original as its title and rivetingly so... It is one of the most inventive books I have read in a long time, and utterly compelling... This book demands to be read again and again, for it is not so much the solving of the mystery that is compulsive, but the gentle, sensitive, humorous and intensely colourful creation of a world far from our own
Oxford Times
Sue Monk Kidd has written a wonderful novel about mothers and daughters and the transcendent power of love
Connie May Fowler
Lily is a wonderfully petulant and self-absorbed adolescent, and Kidd deftly portrays her sense of injustice as it expands to accomodate broader social evils...August and her sisters, June and May, are no mere vehicles for Lily's salvation; they are individuals as fully imagined as the sweltering, kudzu-carpeted landscape that surrounds them
New York Times Book Review
What a splendid novel! It's wonderfully thoughtful and sensitive and compulsively readable
Susan Isaacs
An incredibly original and imaginative book with great charm and atmosphere
Glasgow Evening Times
A wonderful modern fairy tale...a touching story with a memorable cast of characters
The Big Issue
A hive's worth of appealing female characters, an off-beat plot and a lovely style... Deeply satisfying
Publishers Weekly
A honey-sweet novel
Elle
Superb
Woman & Home
Maybe it is true that there are no perfect books, but I closed this one believing that I had found perfection. The language is never anything short of crystalline and inspired. The plotting is subtle and careful and exquisitely executed...The characters are lovable and deep-hearted, fully dimensional, never pat. The story endures long after the book is slipped back onto the shelf
Book magazine

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