In a book club and starting to plan your reads for next year? Check out our 2025 picks.

BookBrowse Reviews The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Summary |  Excerpt |  Reviews |  Beyond the book |  Read-Alikes |  Genres & Themes |  Author Bio

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

The Bee Sting

A Novel

by Paul Murray
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
  • Readers' Rating:
  • First Published:
  • Aug 15, 2023, 656 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jun 2024, 656 pages
  • Rate this book

  • Buy This Book

About This Book

Reviews

BookBrowse:


Award-winning novelist Paul Murray's The Bee Sting is a family drama that feels both expansive in its scope and intimate in its perceptions.

Readers of Paul Murray's Booker Prize–longlisted novel Skippy Dies won't be surprised at The Bee Sting's 650-page heft; Skippy Dies was just as heavy physically but lighter in tone. By contrast, The Bee Sting opens with a stark and far from comedic anecdote: "In the next town over, a man had killed his family.... Everyone was talking about it—about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had." The incident grabs the attention of teenager Cass Barnes and her friend Elaine, who are fascinated by this tragedy so close to their small town outside Dublin, and also sets the mood for the story that follows.

Studious, high-achieving Cass has recently been drawn into the carefree, vivacious Elaine's orbit; daughters of two of the town's most prominent businessmen, the girls form a friendship that is both expected (by virtue of their proximity) and unlikely (due to their very different personalities). But as Cass grows increasingly fascinated by Elaine and worried that her family's money troubles might jeopardize her ability to afford Trinity College Dublin, she begins engaging in risks of all kinds, behavior with consequences that might make her academic choices for her.

Even less rationally, Cass's younger brother, 12-year-old PJ, has become convinced that the family's financial hardships might cause them to send him away to boarding school. He finds comfort and (he believes) friendship chatting online with strangers about video games, and hatches half-baked plans to run away and meet up with an online acquaintance in Dublin.

Cass and PJ's mother Imelda, a one-time beauty, is dealing with the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis by selling jewelry and other valuables on eBay while growing ever more suspicious and resentful of her husband. She finds comfort in the arms of Big Mike (Elaine's father), whose business sense, charisma, and competence couldn't be less like Imelda's husband Dickie.

How did the family get into this mess in the first place? Perhaps a shrewder or more passionate businessman could have pulled the family Volkswagen dealership through the economic downturn, but Dickie Barnes is not that man. He's failing, the business is failing, and so Dickie, who never wanted to run the business in the first place, chooses to retreat—taking up with a cagey conspiracy theorist and outfitting a forest shack as a survivalist bunker.

The novel concentrates on each of the members of the Barnes family in turn, initially in long narrative sections that could stand alone as substantial short stories, complete with distinctive narrative voices (particularly Imelda's, which reads almost as stream-of-consciousness, with little to no punctuation). At first, readers are introduced to each character's current circumstances and crises, but soon elements of their history become interwoven with their present, and it becomes increasingly clear that their motivations are far more complicated than they first appear, their secrets darker and more desperate, and their stakes extremely high.

The length of The Bee Sting means that Murray has a very large canvas with which to work, enabling him to engage with big issues like sexuality, immigration, childhood trauma, and social class. But this expansiveness also allows him to delve deeply into each character's personality and personal history, giving readers essentially a series of intimate portraits of the Barnes family members. The foreshadowing of tragedy that Murray sets in motion from that very first sentence of the novel becomes ever more imposing. Mistakes and secrets pile on top of one another, and as the narrative shifts more quickly between characters' perspectives, readers can start to foresee what might be about to happen, compelled to keep reading even as they hope against hope for a happy ending.

Reviewed by Norah Piehl

This review first ran in the August 2, 2023 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Bee Sting, try these:

  • Long Island Compromise jacket

    Long Island Compromise

    by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

    Published 2024

    About This book

    More by this author

    An exhilarating novel about one American family, the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, and the wild legacy of trauma and inheritance, from the New York Times bestselling author of Fleishman Is in Trouble.

  • Dinosaurs jacket

    Dinosaurs

    by Lydia Millet

    Published 2023

    About This book

    More by this author

    Over twelve novels and two collections Lydia Millet has emerged as a major American novelist. Hailed as "a writer without limits" (Karen Russell) and "a stone-cold genius" (Jenny Offill), Millet makes fiction that vividly evokes the ties between people and other animals and the crisis of extinction.

We have 6 read-alikes for The Bee Sting, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Paul Murray
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes

Top Picks

  • Book Jacket
    Something, Not Nothing
    by Sarah Leavitt
    In 2020, after a lifetime of struggling with increasingly ill health, Sarah Leavitt's partner, ...
  • Book Jacket
    A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens
    by Raul Palma
    Raul Palma's debut novel A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens introduces Hugo Contreras, who came to the ...
  • Book Jacket
    The MANIAC
    by Benjamin Labatut
    The MANIAC by Benjamin Labatut is an ambitious work that falls squarely into the category of fiction...
  • Book Jacket: Blood Test
    Blood Test
    by Charles Baxter
    Brock Hobson is a loving single father, a Sunday School teacher, and an upstanding and honest ...

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Libby Lost and Found
    by Stephanie Booth

    Libby Lost and Found is a book for people who don't know who they are without the books they love.

Who Said...

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

H I O the G

and be entered to win..

Your guide toexceptional          books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.