The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees is a novel by the American author Sue Monk Kidd, set in 1964 and a coming-of-age story about loss, betrayal and the interracial landscape of the civil-rights era in the American South. The book received critical acclaim and was a New York Times bestseller, and it won the 2004 Book Sense Book of the Year award in paperback and was nominated for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction.

The setting is the fictional town of Sylvan, South Carolina, where Lily lives with her abusive father, T. Ray, and an African-American maid, Rosaleen. The blurred memory of her mother's death is the organising fact of Lily's life, and the novel supplies a recurring image to go with it: every night, bees fly into her bedroom, which is the detail the book is remembered for and the connection to the household that eventually takes her in.

The plot is a departure. Rosaleen is arrested after insulting the town's racists, and Lily decides they should both leave for Tiburon, where her mother's past can be investigated. They are taken in by three Black beekeeping sisters who keep a Black Madonna in their house, and the novel's movement is from a household of fear to one of work, honey and devotion, over one summer.