For the Barnes family, life is not what they expected. As the family's car dealership is on the precipice of failure. But Dickie, the dealership's manager, seems more focused on building a bunker in their backyard than trying to save it. His wife, Imelda, also seems to have largely given up, selling her jewelry for money and spending more time with Big Mike, a local cattle farmer. Their daughter seems to have given up on school, and their son spends much of his time online preparing to run away from home. On the verge of individual and collective crisis, the novel explores the ways they have all become estranged from one another and what led them there.

This is a powerful, complex, and insightful story. It explores interesting ideas about how well one can know even the closest people in their lives, the internal struggles everyone is dealing with, the pull of the desire for connection, and the impacts of family expectations.

Highly recommended.

Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies (2010) represented a high watermark in modern tragicomic fiction and his latest The Bee Sting picks up that baton with grace and energy.

After 2015’s The Mark and the Void, a pleasant and moving (though far more cryptic) dive into metafiction, The Bee Sting represents a return to expected territory for Murray though not without new wrinkles and lessons picked up from the former title.

Black comedy, numb tragedy, family drama/trauma, high school, and years of oppression - it’s all here. Highly recommended for fans of Murray’s prior work, epic family sagas, and the fact that all the comedies on tv are about depression these days.

This is the first book I have read by Murray. My initial thoughts as I started reading this were that it was too long. However, as I read further into the novel, I realized I was in the hands of a master who was perfectly pacing his story. I appreciate the lengthy sections that follow each character in hindsight. Those sections really help to allow the reader to become familiar with his characters. I also loved that the chapter switched to being shorter at the end of the novel--mirroring the dramatic action. Plus, the foreshadowing throughout the novel is fantastic--something I only really realized after finishing and discussing the book with others who have read it. This is truly a fantastic novel and I will be seeking out more Paul Murray.

In the hands of a less talented writer The Bee Sting's length and format may not have worked at all but Paul Murray is a gifted storyteller who weaves detailed, very human stories from the lives of this dysfunctional family. Arguably the same story could have been told in half the length but for readers wanting to be entertained by the multilayered stories and sharp-witted observations and nuances of these lives the journey will be an enjoyable one.
Ambiguous endings will always divide readers' opinions but here an earlier conversation which Imelda had with Rose hints at the outcome and I'm glad not to have had the aftermath of the situation spelled out in detail.
The formatting of the text towards ending (at least in the Kindle edition) was a little difficult to follow and I found the lack of punctuation in Imelda's chapters distracting.
I'm very keen to go back to Murray's earlier works. My thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for an advance review copy

So many of the bad things that happen in the world come from people pretending to be something they’re not."

The ending was terrible and it could have been half the length

This book was just too long and tedious. I think this novel would've been better if it was trimmed by 40%. I just don't have the time and energy to read such a bloated and pretentious book.

Paul Murray's THE BEE STING is a family saga Masterpiece of originality. Although the plot takes place in Ireland, it can be anywhere. Brilliant characterizations which holds your interest from beginning to end. The last part of the book is hard to put down. One thinks one is watching a movie as it builds to a chilling climax. What more can be said! Read it and discuss with your book groups. Perfect.

Loved this long but engaging family novel, all the way to its cinematic but ambiguous ending.. Will go back and read Skippy Dies.

*Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of "The Bee Sting" by Paul Murray.

Did I love most of this book? Yes. Was it incredibly (and IMHO unnecessarily) long + a little slow in certain paints? Also yes. I tricked myself into reading this one because I had a digital copy on my Kindle, and I didn't look up the page count before starting. When I began to feel like I was making little to no progress in how much of the book I read (love that handy % counter in the corner), I decided to check, and woweee! 650 pages, which very well could make it the longest book I've ever read.

That being said, "The Bee Sting" is, as another reviewer put it, an "extraordinary story about the derailing of a once prosperous family." While it was sometimes hard to follow (and there were some characters I cared decidedly less about than others), I thoroughly enjoyed following this family and their friends around their small Irish town—and occasionally to Dublin and back. Murray has a unique way of weaving each person together, past and present. I also didn't love the ending (though I might have just been incredibly keen to be done with this very long book and get to start a new one).

I tried this twice, because I LOVED "Skippy Dies." I read 30%, which in a book of this length is quite a lot. I kept waiting to get to the point where I couldn't stop reading, but that never happened, so I can stop reading.

Set in a small town in Ireland this modern day story finds the Barnes family in trouble.
Dickie’s auto sales and repair business is loosing it’s reputation and going bankrupt. His secret past is coming back to haunt him. Dickie’s stunningly beautiful wife Imelda comes from an abusive family and has been addicted to buying the finer things in life. She resents having to sell her possessions to try to keep the family afloat. Teenage daughter Cass is in her senior year of high school and at the top of her class. She’s drinking out of control, doing drugs and having plenty of sex. Pre-teen son PJ’s best friend no longer wants to hangout. PJ’s being bullied and determined to run away from home and meet up with his online friend Ethan whom he has never met. This story has a slow start that picks up speed as it gets deeper into the lives of these four characters. The ending quickly hurls the reader to it’s conclusion. Don’t be distracted by the lack of punctuation in parts of this book, they are intentional and very effective. I was not sure how I felt about this story when I finished it. As I reflect on it I think that because of the length of the book (656 pages) it may not be for everyone but overall if you stick with it, it’s going to be very well received.
This ARC was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Difficult book for me to rate. Based on the first third of the book, I would have given it four stars. The writing style is compelling, though sometimes confusing about whose perspective and timeframe are being discussed. Then the book got slow for me in the middle third. The end of the book was the most frustrating and confusing part - suspenseful so that I really wanted to finish it, while at the same time resenting how long it was taking to get to the end. It is a long book. Good character development and excellent insight into the characters' mindset and motives. Nevertheless, it was too long and too wacky at the end. Talented author but needs to learn how to tell his story with fewer words.

An exceptionally long novel that is also a small multigenerational story about the inability to escape the past -- even if our mistakes weren't supposed to be mistakes, even if our decisions were made with the best intentions. Murray writes the hell out of these paragraphs and sentences (including the many that lack punctuation), and the characters are vivid and funny and anguished. Is there still a place in the culture for a 656-page novel about four regular people? I love books, and I come from a world of regular people, and yet still I'm not so sure.

First, we’ll state the obvious and say this book is long. Now, that is not inherently a bad thing, nor did I feel for a large portion of the book that the book was rambling or unnecessary. I *do* want to say, however, that I felt the book’s length. It’s akin to a movie like Australia by Baz Luhrman where everything works but every section also felt like a full novel in and of itself.

I also do get it’s recurrence on book prize lists this season. It’s topical, it’s funny, it’s dark, it’s formally inventive, and it’s (for the most part) fairly sensitive. Spoilers to follow.

By the end of the book, and the farther I get from reading it, the more the last third of the book does increasingly offend me. First, I don’t have time for a straight male author forcing a gay character to suffer assault. This feels slightly hypocritical based on books I’ve loved from Queer authors and straight women, but that already left a poor taste in my mouth.

The fact that Murray couples that with an unrelenting blackmail campaign while an incredibly toxic straight male character who largely gets by unscathed was infuriating to me. And then the fact that he has that same straight man commit a random and unnecessary act of violence against a woman just to get to the “explosive” final scene.

I love a chunky, family drama and I’m always glad when a book prize longlist includes one. On this year’s International Booker list, it was A System So Magnificent it is Blinding, and now on the English Booker, it’s Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting. Nice and chunky and I was glad to buddy read it with other bookstagrammers.

Like its longlist companion, If I Survive You, The Bee Sting is a story told from a variety of points of view. The story of the Barnes family, owners of the eponymous car dealership in a small Irish town is one of secrets and mysteries which Murray helps us uncover by giving each family member their own section, first teenaged daughter Cass, then tween brother PJ, followed by their parents, first appearance-conscious mother Imelda, and finally, father Dickie. And then, in the final section, there’s a increasingly escalating rotation between each POV as the stakes of the narrative ratchet ever higher into the kind of ending you’d expect in a thriller movie where the camera is following each character and the audience is yelling “Noooooo!!!”).

The Bee Sting appears to be one of those books which divides people, some love it while others definitely don’t. I enjoyed the process of unpacking a messy family history that touches on all kinds of issues (classism, homophobia, familial obligation, expectations of women, and lots more). It is a book about how family obligations necessitate secrets which, when they are eventually exposed, lead to more ruinous consequences than would have likely occurred if everyone had just been open in the first place. If that makes sense.

There are definitely some important warnings for readers including intimate partner assault, child abuse, animal death among them. It can be a lot but it’s a big book so these don’t weigh the story down in the way they might in a shorter book (looking at you, Old God’s Time). I haven’t yet decided whether The Bee Sting will make my personal short list, but I did enjoy it.

11th of the 2023 Booker longlist for me to read. ranking 4th so far.

I read and enjoyed Murray's previous Booker nominee, Skippy Dies back when it first appeared, and that lead me to subsequent perambulations through his other two novels, which I didn't think were nearly as good. This fourth volume also has a few 'problems', its 656-page length being the primary one. Also, it's being touted as a 'comic masterpiece' and though it certainly displays a modicum of dry wit (the YOUR NAME ass tattoo being perhaps the highlight!), there are virtually NO LOL moments in it - and its focus on a hugely dysfunctional family, with themes of physical abuse, alcoholism/drug abuse, repressed sexuality, blackmail, murder, squirrel annihilation, etc., doesn't really lend itself to such.

Ultimately, you can see why the author goes into such minute detail about each of the four members of the Barnes family which forms the core of the plot, but the novel really doesn't get 'going' till about the one-third mark (for me anyway), with the revelations about patriarch Dickie's secret proclivities. The ending, somewhat open-ended but also rather bleak, is also a bit problematic, since the author's reticence to definitively wrap things up is a bit of a cop-out. But Murray's prose stylings certainly are exemplary throughout, with some of his more florid sentences crying out for rereading.

The Kindle edition is also formatted rather bizarrely, with chapters numbered oddly, and the final chapter suddenly in a different layout that made it difficult to read - annoying!

This was really looong.
That being said, it was a great character study of a family in crisis. The narrative perspective shifts between all four members of the Barnes family - mother, father, daughter and son - and a couple other minor characters towards the end. The switching perspectives took a little while to get used to, but once I did, I found it an effective storytelling tool for laying out all of their dysfunction that’s been brewing for years.
I thought the author made some weird choices, though, like eschewing punctuation for some chapters, and writing in second person for all of the characters towards the end of the book.
I’m sure he had reasons that made sense to him, but I couldn’t figure it out.
Thanks to #netgalley and #farrarstrausgiroux for this #arc of #thebeesting by #paulmurray in exchange for an honest review.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. Thank you @fsgbooks @netgalley for providing me with an advance copy of the epub!

Impressions: The Bee Sting by Paul Murray follows the shared (and not shared) lives of the Barnes family as they navigate challenging times in the face of a failing family business. Told in separate sections recounted by each family member we learn about how thye are dealing with the challenges in their own ways. Cass, the teen almost out the door to university, is binge drinking and blowing off her studies, PJ the adolescent is trying to scrape up money to pay off someone threatening him because he thinks PJ’s father stole money from his family, Imelda the wife is contemplating her past while looking for ways to feel less lonely, and Dickie the father is building a bunker in the woods preparing for the end of the world. The storytelling is not linear with a number of flashbacks providing us with information that helps understand the state we find the family in the present day.

This book started a bit slow for me. For some reason, I thought the first section from the perspective of Cass was fine, but it also didn’t really engage me. Then I started PJ’s section and it pulled me right in. From that point forward, the story just continued to build for me and my investment and adoration continued to grow with every page. Murray manages to expertly craft a family story that includes the small, often mundane details of daily life (which I love) while at the same time including many unexpected and surprising revelations throughout that made me want to keep reading. At times I was on the edge of my seat, terrified for what would come next. At the same time there were other sections (especially Imelda) that at the moment felt very long, but by the end I would probably be happy to read an entire 600+ page book on each character.

While there are obviously a lot of things going on in a 600+ page book, one of the things that most resonated with me was the shared experience of the characters related to their desire for connection while at the same time a longing for something they didn’t have and an intense desire to escape. Such a great portrayal of having what you want but not wanting what you have. Also an interesting exploration of the consequences to ourselves as well as those around us of hiding parts of ourselves or trying to pretend that essential parts of our being aren’t there and how it contributes to our loneliness and longing for something else. And ultimately how in the end, for better or worse, you’re in it together.

There is definitely a climate change and doomsday prepping element in the backdrop of this novel, as well as some aspects that I believe were lost on me because I’m missing some context as an American and am not familiar with Ulysses. Thankfully my buddy readers helped with some of this but I think it would have been helpful knowing some of this going in.

This book has been called humorous (a tragicomedy) and personally I didn’t read it that way. I did at times try to find humor in these pages but for me most of the book was heavy and tragic. So if you go into this looking for a laugh you might want to reconsider or reset your expectations. Or you might see the humor that I didn’t.

I am so grateful to Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Netgalley for the advanced copy, but the formatting of the ending in the eARC was a little difficult to follow and I think it dampened the impact of the ending for me. This may have been fixed in the final epub but if you can get your hands on a paper copy for the ending I would recommend it.

This book is long but it is so good it is worth the investment. I highly recommend it and even though this is the only book I have read so far off the @bookerprize 2023 long list I’m sure it is a strong contender to win.

I haven't been this excited to answer the "What are you reading" question in a long time. On the plane, or to friends, or at the nail salon. The Bee Sting has been my enthusiastic response for the past few weeks.

Set in and around Dublin around the 2009 financial crisis, it's a big sweeping family drama, told from the perspectives of each member. Teenage Cass going through her teenage problems with her questionable bff, getting in and out of trouble, trying to pass her exams and escape the small town village, goes first. Next up is preteen PJ, a gamer, bullied at school, kind of ignored at home, making questionable online friends. The parents, beauty queen Imelda and inept car salesman Dickie get passing references in these sections, just little glimpses, they're the background to the kids' stories.

Then of course we get their sections and they go deep. Deep into their pasts (which explains multitudes about the present), minor decisions or events that propel the narrative in its inevitable direction:

"Life at that time was like walking on a path made of spinning tops You took a step you were spun off one way The next step spun you off another Every moment was the moment when everything changed."

We spend hundreds of pages with each character and each page grows empathy with them. Murray pokes fun (this is a tragi-comedy saga) but it's not mean, it's relatable.

Every page is packed with beautiful prose. Each sentence is a work of art:

"On and on, up and down, the exhausting flux of emotions locked tight inside you, like a rollercoaster in a prison."

I loved reading this book, and truly thought it could have been a few hundred pages longer (it clocks in at around 650).

My thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for the ARC. The Bee Sting was published in August 2023.

DNF. Sorry, but I tried 4 times to get into this story and I just can't relate. Cass and Elaine are supposed to be studying for their leaving certificate, but are hanging out in bars, kissing boys and ignoring their studies. I read or skimmed up to the time they take the exam.

It bored me enough to fall asleep twice. The other 2 attempts found me skimming as it was so slow and empty of anything interesting that it did not make me care what was happening.

Maybe it got better after I gave up, but I will not be going back to finish.

Thank you NetGalley for an advance reader copy. Opinions expressed here are my own and are given voluntarily.