The Bee Sting
A Novel
by Paul Murray
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Pub Date Aug 15 2023 | Archive Date Sep 30 2023
Description
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.
A Note From the Publisher
Advance Praise
“A triumph from Irish writer Paul Murray, even better than his 2010 cult story of school life, Skippy Dies . . . Murray excels at the confusions and comedy of young adulthood, and the intensity of teenage friendship. We see that again here . . . The Bee Sting deserves all the praise I am heaping on it. It is generous, immersive, sharp-witted and devastating; the sort of novel that becomes a friend for life.” —John Self, Financial Times
★ “This is a big, multilayered book full of secrets and surprises. But not a word is wasted in this unsettling, character-rich, devilishly plotted page-turner.” —Barbara Love, Library Journal (starred review)
“The Bee Sting is the finest novel that Murray has yet written and will surely be one of the books of 2023." —John Boyne, Sunday Independent (UK)
"On a par with Skippy Dies, Murray's most beloved book, and certainly exceeds it in ambition. A masterpiece." —Irish Independent
“Murray is exploring the way families can always sense the emotional temperature, even if they don’t know where the fire is coming from. 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, not least in regard to the climate crisis. He can also create a laugh-out-loud moment . . . You won’t read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.” —Justine Jordan, The Guardian
“[The Bee Sting] furthers [Paul Murray's] reputation as a writer of tragicomedy without peer . . . Stories are relayed over successive chapters, often in exquisite detail, and brought to vivid life, each with their own distinctive cadence, along with an amalgam of attendant eccentricities and gripes . . . The Bee Sting is both brilliant entertainment and a penetrating look at the human condition, as heavy with pathos as it is rich with humour. And if 650 pages asks a lot of the reader, in this case it more than delivers.” —Nick Duerden, i (UK)
“Trust Paul Murray to make 650 pages feel too short. Seriously . . . Murray unspools the lives of four relatively ordinary people with such brilliant specificity and extravagant empathy, in cool-water prose mixed with his trademark wry darkness, that it’s difficult to let them go at the end.” —Emily Temple, Literary Hub
★ “No moment or episode is implausible . . . carried by Murray’s fine, measured prose and uncanny plotting . . . Irresistible.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
★ “Murray is a master of the darkly ominous, limning these four seemingly demon-driven lives in granular detail. The novel moves expertly among them, switching from one point of view to another while offering both present circumstances and characters’ back stories. Like Murray’s Skippy Dies (2010), this is a tour de force, beautifully written (a cat was 'so black it looked like a hole in the universe') and perfectly apposite in its tone. It is, in sum, utterly fascinating and unforgettable.” —Michael Cart, Booklist (starred review)
“Paul Murray is my favorite young Irish novelist and The Bee Sting confirms all of his talents. Settle in for a hilarious whirlwind of familial socioeconomic misadventure as only Murray would write it.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Our Country Friends
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9780374600303 |
| PRICE | $30.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 656 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Kiley D, Reviewer
I LOVED this book. I am a huge fan of Paul Murray and I think this is his best book yet; even better than Skippy Dies. It is heartbreaking in parts but also emotionally uplifting without ever feeling cheap or twee. I was equally interested in all of the sections on Dickie, Imelda, Cass, and PJ and equally invested in all of their storylines, which I think is unusual. This is funny and moving and ahh just so very good.
Alyssa G, Reviewer
the only way i can put into words how this book made me feel is: the heart's invisible furies by john boyne + armond in white lotus S1. and by that i mean i felt irish and anxious.
this books SLAPS. i read its 700+ pages in 2 days. i wanted to grab every character by the shoulders and tell them to get. a. grip.
the bee sting centers around a nuclear family in modern day ireland. dad is distracting himself with doomsday prep as his business goes under; mom is bitterly reigning in her shopping addiction as she recounts her unpleasant girlhood, daughter is dabbling in binge drinking, questionable men, and arduous friendships in her final year of high school; and son is finalizing his plans to run away from home.
admittedly i avoided starting this novel, in part due to its length but also i just wasn't excited about it. but wow. these people are DISASTERS. the plot constantly thickened. i was panicking on all of their behalf. frankly, i'm obsessed and counting down the days until 8/15 when i can talk about it with all of you. if you don't add this to your "want to read" pile i'm taking it as an affront.
Se O, Reviewer
So grateful to FSG and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and comment on The Bee Sting by Paul Murray.
Skippy Dies is behind me on a bookshelf as I write this. I very much enjoyed An Evening of Long Goodbyes and The Mark and the Void but Skippy Dies is one of my favourite books to have ever read. I was hoping that The Bee Sting wouldn't disappoint, Murray isn't the most prolific of authors after all, and I've very glad to say it did not.
The lives, loss, loves, and tragedies of a few connected families in small town Ireland. We follow multiple story lines from the point of view of multiple characters.
Those sections start of being quite long but as the story begins to pick up pace and we hurtle towards to conclusion each character's segments get shorter and shorter and more and more breathless. I found it a very clever structural approach. Another structural/stylistic element that at first I thought was a formatting error with the e-ARC is that the Imelda sections are, with the exception of paragraphs and upper case letters, almost completely unpunctuated. Some people will hate that but it's a connection with the character that really works.
Version after version of key occurrences in their lives are related by various characters and layer after layer of their lives and stories are uncovered.
You don't have to have grown up in a small Irish town in the late 20th and early 21st century to enjoy this but it definitely helps. Having come from that background so much of it was all too familiar. The 'elites' and the hand-rubbing glee when there's a fall from grace, the insecurity and inferiority complex when moving to Dublin, the fear of being 'different.' Just so well captured.
Then there's the climax ...
Astonishingly good and up there with Colum McCann as our finest writers of the past several decades.
If we have to wait another decade for another one as good as Skippy Dies and The Bee Sting I'll be impatient but happy to wait.
Reviewer 1127653
When I turned the last page of THE BEE STING, I sat for a good 30 minutes on the beach quite literally stunned without words. The pacing reminded me of THE LUMINARIES (slow start that rapidly escalates) and the second half had the slow burn literary thriller vibes of YOUNG MUNGO or BIRNAM WOOD.
THE BEE STING is almost exclusively told from the four Barnes family members in turn, looking back on the past and worrying about the future. I’m hesitant to say much more because this book is best served without a lot of set up (even the Kirkus review gave up too much, in my opinion). The unveiling of story is the gem of THE BEE STING. This is truly a kaleidoscope of a book, where each section shifts the perspective and brings new light to the narrative. Murray is accomplishing so much without ever being heavy-handed or didactic.
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