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Summary and Reviews of The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

The Bee Sting

A Novel

by Paul Murray
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus:
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  • First Published:
  • Aug 15, 2023, 656 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Jun 2024, 656 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

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 rather than face the music, he's 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, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way through her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil—can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written—is there still time to find a happy ending?

I

In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He'd nailed the doors shut so they couldn't get out; the neighbours heard them running through the rooms, screaming for mercy. When he had finished he turned the gun on himself.

Everyone was talking about it – about what kind of man could do such a thing, about the secrets he must have had. Rumours swirled about affairs, addiction, hidden files on his computer.

Elaine just said she was surprised it didn't happen more often. She thrust her thumbs through the belt loops of her jeans and looked down the dreary main street of their town. I mean, she said, it's something to do.

Cass and Elaine first met in Chemistry class, when Elaine poured iodine on Cass's eczema during an experiment. It was an accident; she'd cried more than Cass did, and insisted on going with her to the nurse. They'd been friends ever since. Every morning Cass called to Elaine's house and they walked to school together. At lunchtime, they rolled up their long ...

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  • award image

    Nero Book Awards
    2023

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

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). 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...continued

Full Review (605 words)

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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).

Media Reviews

Literary Hub
Trust Paul Murray to make 650 pages feel too short. Seriously ... Murray unspools the lives of four relatively ordinary people with such brilliant specificity and extravagant empathy, in cool-water prose mixed with his trademark wry darkness, that it's difficult to let them go at the end.

Financial Times (UK)
Murray excels at the confusions and comedy of young adulthood, and the intensity of teenage friendship. We see that again here ... The Bee Sting deserves all the praise I am heaping on it. It is generous, immersive, sharp-witted and devastating; the sort of novel that becomes a friend for life.

The Guardian (UK)
Murray is exploring the way families can always sense the emotional temperature, even if they don't know where the fire is coming from. He is brilliant on fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, grief, self-sabotage and self-denial, as well as the terrible weakness humans have for magical thinking, not least in regard to the climate crisis. He can also create a laugh-out-loud moment ... You won't read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year.

Booklist (starred review)
Murray is a master of the darkly ominous, limning these four seemingly demon-driven lives in granular detail. The novel moves expertly among them, switching from one point of view to another while offering both present circumstances and characters' back stories. Like Murray's Skippy Dies (2010), this is a tour de force, beautifully written (a cat was "so black it looked like a hole in the universe") and perfectly apposite in its tone. It is, in sum, utterly fascinating and unforgettable.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
No moment or episode is implausible ... carried by Murray's fine, measured prose and uncanny plotting ... Irresistible.

Library Journal (starred review)
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.

Publishers Weekly
[A]mbitious...The third act veers into a baroque tragedy...The questions aren't always enough to sustain the story, but their open-ended nature provokes readers to hang on to the end.

Reader Reviews

Eleanor Casey

Mystical
Wonderful writer. True pleasure to read. I liked Paul’s decisions to choose Imelda to be under educated in terms of class distinction. I can hear her frustration and capacity to knowing that she needs to get what she wants because she knows no one ...   Read More
Gloria M

Tour de Force
There are countless reasons "The Bee Sting" by Paul Murray is shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize. It was on this reviewer's TBR list BEFORE that honor was announced! It is a tour de force, an epic work that demands to be in your home library! ...   Read More
M Zubair

A Riveting Dive into Suspense -
The Bee Sting," penned by an author whose name is bound to be on everyone's lips soon, is a remarkable dive into the world of suspense fiction that leaves readers buzzing with excitement. From the moment you flip open the book's cover, you're plunged...   Read More
Kolin

The Bee Sting: A Novel of Family, Fortune, and Morality
The Bee Sting is a brilliant and ambitious novel that captures the zeitgeist of our times with intelligence and compassion. Paul Murray has written a masterpiece of contemporary fiction that combines humor and tragedy, realism and fantasy, satire ...   Read More

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Beyond the Book



The Nazis and the German Auto Industry

Photo of a tan-colored VW utility vehicle used by German forces in WWII In Paul Murray's novel The Bee Sting, Dickie Barnes is the reluctant owner of a failing Volkswagen dealership. One character provokes Dickie's teenage daughter Cass by telling her that Volkswagen was started by the Nazis, so it's no great loss if the dealership shuts down. And it's true that even though these days Volkswagen might be best known as the developer of iconic vehicles like the Beetle, the Rabbit, and the VW Bus, or as the originator of the 1990s "Fahrvergnügen" advertising campaign, the company did indeed get its start as a project of the German government under the control of the National Socialist Party.

Volkswagen was founded in 1937 as Gesellschaft zur Vorbereitung des Deutschen Volkswagens mbH, soon renamed ...

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Read-Alikes

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