The bee sting

Title:

The bee sting

Author:

Murray, Paul, 1975- author.

Summary:

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. -- Amazon.

General Note:

"Originally published in 2023 by Hamish Hamilton, Great Britain"--Title page verso.

Edition:

First American edition.

Physical Description:

645 pages ; 24 cm

Genre:

Domestic fiction.

Humorous fiction.

Psychological fiction.

Subject Term:

Families -- Fiction.

Dysfunctional families -- Fiction.

Fortune -- Fiction.

Bunkers (Fortification) -- Fiction.

Finance, Personal -- Fiction.

Publisher:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux,

Publication Date:

2023

ISBN:

9780374600303

Publication Information:

New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Call Number:

MURRAY

Holds: Copies:

Available:*

Item Barcode	Collection	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
33607003670463	New Adult Fiction	MURRAY Paul	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

Bound With These Titles

On Order

Summary

One of The New York Times T op 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.

Author Notes

Paul Murray was born in 1975 in Dublin. He is the author of three previous novels. An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003) was short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies (2010) was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Mark and the Void (2015) was the joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was named one of Time' s Top 10 Fiction Books of the year.

Reviews (2)

Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Aug.)

Library Journal Review

In a small town outside of Dublin, an economic downturn spells trouble for the once-affluent Barnes family at the heart of this latest from Murray, perhaps best known for the Booker Prize--shortlisted Skippy Dies. For Cass, finishing up high school, it's the worry that her parents won't be able to send her to university. For her little brother, PJ, it's the illogical fear that they will send him away to boarding school. Shopaholic mother Imelda is forced to curtail her spending and sell off some of her treasures. For father Dickie, who has lived in the shadow of his dead brother, a beloved football star, it's the disgrace of running his father's car business into the ground. Will Grandfather return from his golfing life in Portugal to set things right and save the family from those who threaten them, including a gang of local thugs, a Polish blackmailer, an online predator, and a crackpot survivalist, or will it all implode? VERDICT 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