The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

This is an intimate, skillfully crafted and funny epic of a book.

It tells the story of a family in Ireland who suffer financial loss following the economic crash and face selling their car dealership business. How each member of the family deals with this collapse is completely different as they have their own ambitions, fears and ways of coping. In size, this is a hefty read at over six hundred pages. In storytelling, The Bee Sting is just as hefty.

The book is told in sections from the four members of the family, starting with the teenage daughter as she prepares to off to university in the next few months. Before she goes she wants to experience life so she doesn't turn up un-knowledgeable about life. So, with her manipulative friend, she tries out drinking, boyfriends...the usual stuff.  She can't wait to escape the life in her small hometown, where everyone knows everyone. Her fear is that the financial crisis means that she can't leave.

The next part is from her twelve-year-old brother point of view. His fear is that his parents will divorce and he will be sent to boarding school, which he doesn't want. His other challenge is avoiding a bully and balancing life against games. These two sections are my favourite. They are witty, clever and relatable.

The whole book is written with reduced punctuation, particularly inverted commas, with the bizarre exception of exclamation marks, but the third section from the children's mother doesn't have full stops either (but does have capital letters to indicate the start of a new sentence). This style indicates the mental state of the woman, with her anxiety and regrets driving her thoughts. It does have the effect of racing, breathless, disjointed thinking but loses a bit because the text has to be read slowly to make it comprehensible. This section is also very long: about a third of the size of a typical novel. As we move through the book, sections and chapters become shorter and more urgent; by the end it reads like a play. Perspective changes from first and third person to the second. All very clever, unnecessary, but clever.

A powerful, immersive book about family, fathers, identity and social class; tragedy, shame, denial, cause and effect and how the small things impact the present, where the family mirrors the world. Murray has a grasp on the English language, an original expressive voice that, when  mixed with his visceral knowledge of humanity, is truly mesmerising.  A fantastic read, highly recommended.​

​Winner of the Irish Book of the Year 
Winner of the New York Times Book of the Year
Winner of The Times and Sunday Times Book of the Year 
Winner of the Guardian Book of the Year
Winner of Time Magazine Book of the Year
Winner of the New Yorker Book of the Year
Winner of The Economist Book of the Year
Winner of the Washington Post Book of the Year
Winner of the Independant Book of the Year
​Winner of the Nero Award for Fiction

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Published by Penguin on 8 June 2023.