[home] [news] [this year's award] [publishers] [libraries] [award archive] [faqs] [dublin city public libraries] [IMPAC] [contact us]
|
The
2007 Award
|
|
The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd
|
Nominated by:
Publisher
of Nominated Edition
|
| the complete A-Z listing of nominated authors |
|
ABOUT
THE BOOK
|
| 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. Quill Award Winner 2005. |
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR |
|
Sue
Monk Kidd is the author of two widely acclaimed non-fiction books, The
Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits. She has won
a Poets and Writers Award for the story that began this novel as well
as a Katherine Anne Porter Award, and a Bread Loaf Scholarship. Her fiction
has appeared in several literary journals, and two of her short stories,
including an excerpt from The Secret Life of Bees, were selected as notable
stories in Best American Short Stories. She lives beside a salt marsh
near Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband. The Secret Life of
Bees is her first novel. |
|
|
[home] [news] [this year's award] [publishers] [libraries] [award archive] [dublin city public libraries] [IMPAC] [faqs] [contact us]
Copyright
© 2007 Dublin City Public Libraries
