The Bee Sting - Paul Murray - 2023


By: Paul Murray
Narrated by: Heather O’Sullivan, Barry Fitzgerald, Beau Holland, Ciaran O'Brien, Lisa Caruccio Came
Length: 26 hrs and 10 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 06-08-23
Categories: Literature & Fiction, Family Life, Humor
Language: English
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Format: mp3 64/48 stereo

Publisher's Summary:

Brought to you by Penguin.

SHORLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023

From one of our greatest comic novelists and the author of Skippy Dies comes a funny, thought-provoking story of one family desperately clinging on as their world falls apart . . .

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 wife Imelda is selling off her jewellery on eBay 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 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 tarmac, 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?

©2023 Paul Murray (P)2023 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

I experienced just about every possible human emotion while reading The Bee Sting, and at an intensity I have not felt with a work of fiction for a long time. Its ambition and scale are astonishing, and as a sheer technical feat of storytelling it is remarkable. Reading it, I was constantly reminded of what the novel as an artform is capable of, and what it is for. It might be a bold claim to make, of the author of Skippy Dies, that this new book is the best thing Paul Murray has ever done - but I'm making it anyway, because it's true (Mark O'Connell, author of 'To Be A Machine')

This novel is as generous, expansive, and glorious as a cathedral, as intimate as pillow-talk, and as funny and heartbreaking as nothing you've read before. Paul Murray may just be the most spellbinding storyteller writing today. A magisterial piece of work (Neel Mukherjee, author of 'The Lives of Others')

Paul Murray is my favourite young Irish novelist and The Bee Sting confirms all of his talents. Settle in for a hilarious whirlwind of a familial socioeconomic misadventure as only Murray would write it (Gary Shteyngart, author of 'Super Sad True Love Story')


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