The Bee Sting

The Bee Sting is a 2023 novel by Irish writer Paul Murray, published by Macmillan. The book depicts the dysfunctional, hapless lives of the Barnes family of Ireland, with portions of the book dedicated to the lives of each of the four family members. It was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and won both the An Post Irish Book of the Year award and the Fiction category and overall winner, the Gold Nero, in the inaugural Nero book awards.

Narrative
The novel tells of the Barnes family, a once powerful and wealthy family in Ireland who are now facing financial difficulties after the 2008 global financial crisis. The patriarch of the family, Dickie Barnes, operates a chain of car dealerships and garages that he inherited from his father. But Dickie is having difficulties selling cars and is dealing with a blackmailer who has videos and photos that could upend Dickie's life. To deal with his mounting troubles, Dickie is building a doomsday bunker in the woods with his handyman Victor. Dickie's wife Imelda (whose story is told in a stream of consciousness format with the absence of any punctuation) is reluctantly selling the family's possessions online to try to ease their financial burdens. Imelda grew up with an abusive father and eventually met the love of her life, her high school sweetheart Frank (who was Dickie's brother). Frank died shortly before their wedding and she married Dickie instead. Imelda never removed her veil on the day of their wedding, saying she had been stung by a bee on the drive to the church.

The daughter of the family, Cassie, starts the book in her final year of high school, then attends university at Trinity College in Dublin, excited to escape the small town in which she grew up. Cassie has a toxic friendship with Elaine, a friendship with mutual mistrust that eventually boils over when the two are roommates at Trinity College. The son in the family, 12 year old PJ, is dealing with adolescent angst, he fears his parents are getting a divorce. He interacts with a gamer he met online via text message and plans to run away from home and live with him. At the start of the book, he deals with a bully who is upset because he believes his mother was ripped off by the family's business and spends much of his time in the woods, with his friend Nev, to escape the atmosphere home. Later, his social standing deteriorates alongside his family's financial position, and he spends increasing amounts of time with his father, working on the bunker.

Dickie's wealthy father, Maurice, returns from his retirement in Portugal and appears as though he may be the family's salvation. However his involvement uncovers further problems at the car dealership and he brings Elaine's father, Big Mike, in to run the business in Dickie's stead. This drives Dickie further into his obsession over the bunker and survivalism, and sets up the book's denouement.

Reception
Literary review aggregator Book Marks characterized most reviews of the novel as "Rave" reviews.

Writing for The Guardian, Justine Jordan stated: "This is a sprawling, capacious novel, but expertly foreshadowed and so intricately put together that many throwaway moments only take on resonance on a second reading." She concluded : "You won't read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year." Writing for The New York Times, Jen Doll stated that Murrays writing is "pure joy - propulsive, insightful and seeding with hilarious observations." Writing for The Los Angeles Times, author Jonathan Russell Clark called the novel "a triumph of realist fiction, a big, sprawling social novel in the vein of Jonathan Franzen’s 'Freedom. The review further stated: "The agility with which Murray structures the narrative around the family at its heart is virtuosic and sure-footed, evidence of a writer at the height of his power deftly shifting perspectives, style and syntax to maximize emotional impact. Hilarious and sardonic, heartbreaking and beautiful — there’s just no other way to put it: 'The Bee Sting' is a masterpiece."

Awards and honours
The Bee Sting was included on the year-end lists of the best books of 2023 published by The New York Times  and The New Yorker.