The Bee Sting

Paul Murray | Paperback | August 2023 

Shortlisted for The Booker Prize 2023

Irresistibly funny, wise and thought-provoking - a tragicomic tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is in meltdown...

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 exasperated wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams. And twelve-year-old PJ, in debt to local sociopath 'Ears' Moran, 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 road, a casual favour 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?

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Author Info

Paul Murray, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, is a writer and diplomat who has served in London, Tokyo, Ottawa, New York and Seoul. His biography, A Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (1993), won the Koizumi Yakumo Literary Prize (Japan) in 1995. He has published and lectured in Europe, the USA and Asia.

Paul Murray was born in 1975. He studied English literature at Trinity College in Dublin. He has a Masters degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Paul was a former bookseller. An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 and was nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award.