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The Booker Prizes has an online reading guide for The Bee Sting.
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.
(Summary provided by the publisher)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Murray was born in Dublin in 1975, and wrote his first novel – An Evening of Long Goodbyes – while doing a creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia.
The Bee Sting is Murray’s fourth novel, which is shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. His previous three – An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Skippy Dies and The Mark and the Void – have all met with critical acclaim.
An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies was shortlisted for the Costa Novel award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and longlisted for the Booker Prize. The Mark and the Void won the Everyman Wodehouse Prize 2016. Paul Murray lives in Dublin.
(Biography provided by The Booker Prizes)
