The Bee Sting
A Novel
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3.8 • 488 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Set after Ireland’s 2008 economic crash, this family saga is epic in scale but also surprisingly relatable. The Barnes are a close-knit family, but their bonds are getting tested by hardship. Patriarch Dickie’s second-generation auto dealership falls on hard times; his beautiful wife, Imelda, remains haunted by her first fiancé’s death; their teenage daughter, Cass, is obsessed with her wealthy best friend; and their younger son, PJ, struggles with all the changes around him. Irish novelist Paul Murray, whose Skippy Dies was an Apple Books staff favorite, has a delightfully tragicomic take on the varied (and often hilarious) ways the Barnes family respond to life’s disappointments. Told from all four characters’ perspectives, The Bee Sting is wise and witty.
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
Terrible ending
This book is way too long to have such a terrible ending. Totally disappointing.
Pretty good, but irritating
I enjoyed the writing and most of the story. Several chapters have no punctuation. I thought maybe this was an error in making the e-book. No, it’s a stupid device by the author. The ambiguous ending was irritating also. If I’d been reading a paperback version of this, I would have thrown it across the room.
Depressing
The most depressing book I have ever read. Waste of time and money. Left a pit in my stomach.