The Bee Sting

By (author) Murray, Paul
Description

''A tragicomic triumph. You won''t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year'' Guardian

''It''s a thing of beauty, a novel that will fill your heart'' Observer

''Hugely entertaining, vivid, ambitious and expansive . . . Murray is a natural storyteller'' Irish Times

''An expansive and blackly funny tale'' Tanya Sweeney, Irish Independent

Irresistibly funny, wise and thought-provoking, The Bee Sting is a 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 rather than face the music, he''s spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil - can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written - is there still time to find a happy ending?

Review quote
It can''t be overstated how purely pleasurable The Bee Sting is to read. Murray''s brilliant new novel, about a rural Irish clan, posits the author as Dublin''s answer to Jonathan Franzen . . . A 650-page slab of compulsive high-grade entertainment, The Bee Sting oozes pathos while being very funny to boot . . . Murray''s observational gifts and A-game phrase-making render almost every page - every line, it sometimes seems - abuzz with fresh and funny insights . . . At its core this is a novel concerned with the ties that bind, secrets and lies, love and loss. They''re all here, brought to life with captivating vigour in a first-class performance to cherish
Review quote
The Bee Sting is the finest novel that Murray has yet written and will surely be one of the books of 2023 . . . It bears comparison to the brilliant comic writer Jonathan Coe... But Murray is his own writer, capable of keeping a multi-faceted and compulsive plot moving along with alacrity and confidence, while seamlessly blending drama, comedy and heartbreak... For 13 years, Paul Murray has been best known as the author of Skippy Dies. That, I suspect, is about to change
Review quote
Expertly foreshadowed and so intricately put together, a brilliantly funny, deeply sad portrait of an Irish family in crisis . . . Murray is triumphantly back on home turf - troubled adolescents, regretful adults, secrets signposted and exquisitely revealed, each line soaked in irony ranging from the gentle to the savage . . . We live though hundreds of pages on tenterhooks, and the suspense and revelations keep coming until the end [...] He is brilliant on fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, grief, self-sabotage and self-denial, as well as the terrible weakness humans have for magical thinking... A tragicomic triumph, you won''t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year
Review quote
An immersive, brilliantly structured, beautifully written mega-tonne that is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is deeply disturbing . . . Paul Murray, the undisputed reigning champion of epic Irish tragicomedy, has done it again . . . The Bee Sting is as ambitious as anything that has gone before, but with a focus and shape that grants it great depth as well as breadth. Seriously, all you need is this, your suntan lotion and a few days of