Narrated by Jenna Lamia, the audio version of The Secret Life Of Bees was nominated for Audio of the Year in 2003.. It is available from Highbridge on cassette and CD, unabridged and abridged. The unabridged audio can be rented through Books on Tape.

The Secret Life of Bees was chosen as a GOOD MORNING AMERICA READ THIS! BOOK CLUB selection. Each month the ABC national morning television show features a book as their book club selection. The Secret Life of Bees was selected by the Jane Doe book club of Raleigh, NC, and announced on the October 10, 2002 broadcast of the show.

Viking Penguin’s Vice-President and Executive Editor Pamela Dorman has just acquired the world rights to a new novel by Sue Monk Kidd from Virginia Barber of the William Morris Agency. The Mermaid Chair, set in and around a monastery on a small island along the coast of South Carolina, is the story of a married woman at mid-life who falls in love with a monk, and the complex entanglement of erotic and spiritual passions that play out as she awakens to a new life. The mermaid chair of the title is a carved wooden chair with winged mermaids on its arms that sits in a side chapel of the monastery and whose mystical and seductive powers have influenced the lives of those who sit in it. “This new novel promises to be a novel of real maturity, about a woman’s discovery of her true self, one that evolves through her experiences in both the sensual and spiritual realms, and that is, in fact, a combination of them both. I know it is going to be a book that speaks to Sue Monk Kidd’s deep talents as a writer,” said Dorman. The novel will be published Spring 2005.

The paperback edition of Sue Monk Kidd’s spiritual memoir, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (Harper San Francisco) was available in bookstores August 20, 2002.

The Orange Prize is the United Kingdom’s largest annual literary award for a single novel. The Secret Life Of Bees was nominated (long-listed) for this award in 2002. According to Orange Prize officials, “Since its launch in 1996, the Orange Prize has become one of the most prestigious awards on the literary calendar and was created to celebrate the excellence of women writers.”