About the book
The Bee Sting follows the Barnes family in the Irish midlands as their car dealership falters after the financial crash.
Curated by intendle
Published
Literary Fiction
The Bee Sting
A Novel (US edition)
PM
Written by
Published by
Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK)
- Published
- 2023
- Pages
- 656
- Format
- Hardback
- Language
- English
A once-prosperous Irish family slides toward ruin in Paul Murray's expansive tragicomedy, which anatomizes the Barnes household one member at a time until the full, unlucky shape of their troubles emerges.
Murray is that rare novelist equally at home in farce and heartbreak; he can wring comedy from a teenager's love life and dread from a father's buried past within the same chapter. As the family business fails and the climate darkens at the edges of the story, private secrets and public catastrophe begin to rhyme.
The book's bravura sequences - including a headlong, punctuation-shedding rush through one character's history - show a writer willing to take formal risks in the service of feeling. At more than six hundred pages it never flags, propelled by curiosity about how good intentions and small evasions compound into fate.
Funny, capacious and finally wrenching, it is a family novel for an anxious age, generous to its flawed people even as it marches them toward a startling close.
The book
At a glance
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Pages
656
Published
2023
Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK)
Where to buy
Format
Hardback
UK first edition
Language
English
Literary Fiction
ISBN
978-0241353950
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