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One of The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year
Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year, the Nero Gold Prize, and the Nero Book Award for Fiction
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Writers' Prize for Fiction
Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction
One of The New Yorker's Essential Reads of 2023. One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2023. One of TIME's 10 Best Fiction Books of the Year. Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Economist, New York Public Library, BBC, and more.
From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.
The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.
If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda’s wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man?
The Bee Sting, Paul Murray’s exuberantly entertaining new novel, is a tour de force: a portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.
Author: Paul Murray
Paperback Published 30 April 2024 656 pages
Read and Recommended by Graeme:
"This novel was the popular favourite to scoop up the Booker Prize 2023 and proved to be a Christmas bestseller even though it failed to pick up the prestigious top prize. This family saga has been extremely well reviewed though few reviews have remarked much on the queer content which becomes more prominent in the later stages of this book. It follows the Barnes family: daughter Cass in her final year of school, her 12-year-old gamer obsessed brother P.J., their glamorous mother Imelda, and her husband Dickie, whose family car sales business is failing after the 2008 financial crash. This epic novel has a series of cleverly executed twists - there is even a twist to the title - but it will spoil the story to reveal too much. But Paul Murray is another of these remarkable Irish storytellers and the book, although long at almost 650 pages, is an absolute page turner. It is funny, tragic, and ingeniously plotted, and even has some very atmospheric Irish mysticism thrown in as well. However, it’s when the novel kicks into the sections told from Imelda and Dickie’s point of view that the novel truly takes off with surprising revelations and turning points. Climate change is interwoven into the narrative and it is ironic that the Barnes family wealth is derived from car sales. As Dickie tries to forget his escalating troubles by building a doomsday bunker in the woods, a disaster looms, though it is not derived from car exhaust fumes."
“Reads like an instant classic . . . Murray is a fantastically witty and empathetic writer, and he dazzles by somehow bringing the great sprawling randomness of life to glamorously choreographed climaxes. He is essentially interested in the moral conflicts of our lives, and he handles his characters and their failings with heartbreaking tenderness.”―The Washington Post (Ten Best Books of 2023)
“Irish novelist Paul Murray’s latest is a tragicomedy in the vein of his 2010 best seller Skippy Dies. Balancing humor with devastation, he creates a portrait of a fractured family attempting to survive their personal struggles amid what increasingly feels like the end of the world.”―Shannon Carlin, TIME (Must-Read Books of 2023)
“Every escalation in the novel’s relentless series of unfortunate events is the outcome of intimate circumstances and world-historical ones in equal measure . . . A tragedy of middle-class decline and self-annihilation, The Bee Sting’s accomplishment―a major one―is to bring together the family and the economy as truly intertwined subjects, into a double helix of oikos and oikonomia that twists toward dread.”―Lisa Borst, Bookforum