The Bee Sting
Comedy meets tragedy in this hilarious Booker Prize shortlisted novel
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3.8 • 217 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
THE MULTI AWARD-WINNING NOVEL FROM ONE OF OUR GREATEST LIVING COMEDIC WRITERS
'A tragicomic triumph. You won't read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year' Guardian
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The Barnes family are in trouble.
Until recently they ran the biggest business in town, now they’re teetering on the brink of bankruptcy – and that’s just the start of their problems. Dickie and Imelda’s marriage is hanging by a thread; straight-A student Cass is careening off the rails; PJ is hopelessly in debt to the school bully.
Meanwhile the ghosts of old mistakes are rising out of the past to meet them, but everyone’s too wrapped up in the present to see the danger looming . . .
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'Generous, immersive, sharp-witted and devastating; the sort of novel that becomes a friend for life' Financial Times
‘Paul Murray [is] the undisputed reigning champion of epic Irish tragicomedy’ Spectator
‘An instant classic’ Washington Post
‘[An] astute, remorselessly funny novel’ Daily Mirror
‘A wagyu steak of a novel . . . A classic in the mode of The Corrections’ The Times
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WINNER OF THE NERO BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION 2023
WINNER OF THE SKY ARTS AWARD FOR LITERATURE 2024
WINNER OF AN POST IRISH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Secret pasts, forbidden desires, and shattered illusions figure into this ambitious family drama from Murray (Skippy Dies). Dickie Barnes, once a successful car salesman outside Dublin, forsakes the world to build an apocalyptic bunker in the woods. Still, he remains overshadowed by his late charismatic brother, Frank. Meanwhile, Dickie's wife, Imelda, who can't shake the feeling she should have married Frank, succumbs to the advances of Big Mike, a bewitching cattle farmer. Mike's daughter is best friends with Dickie and Imelda's eldest, the college-bound Cass, who derails her future by yielding to several kinds of temptation. And then there's Cass's young brother, PJ, who makes plans to run away from home with a mysterious online friend named Ethan. The prose is lovely, as Murray flits from teen shorthand to lyrical interiority ("Lying in bed that night he gets that running-out-onto-thin-air feeling. Tomorrow yawns beneath him like a chasm"). The third act veers into a baroque tragedy, as Dickie continues work on the bunker and the reader tries to understand how the Barneses got to this point. Is it the financial crash? The bee that stung Imelda on her wedding day? Or adult life "in all its theatre and cruelty"? The questions aren't always enough to sustain the story, but their open-ended nature provokes readers to hang on to the end.
Customer Reviews
Interesting
Insight into human nature and relationships
Loved it
I couldn’t put this book down!
Ridiculous ending
As I read this book I was compiling a long list of people in my life to gleefully recommend it to. It was clever, surprising, the story was very engaging and I wanted to follow all the many threads the author was leading me down to their ends. I can’t tell you how disappointed I was with the ridiculous ending. This book is the ultimate anticlimax, a long slow-burning mystery that pulls you in and in only to give you absolutely nothing at the end.
I was planning to rate this a 5/5, but all it gets now is a 2.