The Mermaid Chair – Sue Monk Kidd

Forty two and married for half of her life. Jessie Sullivan lives quiet conventionally. She honestly believes that she is happy. She has a lovely home, a good, dependable husband and an accomplished teenage daughter. But when she returns to the remote island of her childhood, to establish the cause of her mother’s increasingly strange behavior, Jessie is drawn to Brother Thomas, a Benedictine monk on the verge of taking his final vows.