The Bee Sting
The Barnes family runs the biggest car dealership in their small Irish town, and the business is collapsing in the wake of the financial crisis. Dickie is hiding inside a doomsday bunker he is building in the woods with a drifter who showed up looking for work. Imelda, his wife, is selling off the family jewelry on eBay one piece at a time. Cass, the straight-A daughter, is careening off the rails before the Leaving Cert. PJ, the younger son, is in debt to a schoolyard bully and planning to run away. Murray rotates the perspective across all four Barnes family members, with prose style and rhythm shifting per character, and old mistakes from before the marriage leak forward until the final chapter rearranges every assumption.
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An Irish family running a collapsing car dealership unravels across four perspectives in this 650-page Booker-shortlisted novel.
The Bee Sting was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and won the An Post Irish Book of the Year. Paul Murray was previously shortlisted for the Booker for Skippy Dies.
The Bee Sting is around 650 pages with multiple narrators and shifting prose styles, including extended unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness sections. Most readers find rewards in the long-haul commitment.
The Bee Sting was written by Paul Murray, published in 2023 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
The Bee Sting is 645 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Bee Sting takes most readers 10 to 14 hours to finish.
The Bee Sting is a standalone novel by Paul Murray, not part of a series.
The Bee Sting is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
