The Bee Sting

Genre

Literary Fiction

Publisher

Hamish Hamilton (Penguin UK)

Publication year

2023

ISBN

9780241353950

The Bee Sting follows the Barnes family in the Irish midlands as their car dealership falters after the financial crash. Paul Murray tells the story of parents Dickie and Imelda and their children Cass and PJ from shifting perspectives, uncovering the secrets and misfortunes behind the family's...

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.