Joan Mackenzie reviews The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

Hello I'm Joan and this book is called The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. It’s a story about a family in crisis. Dickie Barnes and his family are pretty well-off thanks to a new car sales business which he inherited from his father. But things there are tanking and it is all getting a bit grim. His wife Imelda came from a very abject poor background and doesn’t ever want to go back there again so she’s imploring Dickie to ask his father for help while she’s selling off a whole lot of stuff to try and generate some cashflow. But Dickie’s got his head in the sand and he’s out in the woods building a bunker for the end of days and he doesn’t want to know anything about it. They have a daughter Cass who’s heading off to uni and when she does, it brings a shockwave blowback to Dickie about his time own time at university. And then there’s the teenage son PJ who spends all of his time online looking at a screen and he’s found a new friend who won’t ever post a photo. Things inevitably come to a head as they will do in such a big, epic sprawling novel. It’s 600 pages long and I loved every single page. It’s long listed for the 2023 Booker Prize at the time I’m speaking. I hope that it does really well because it deserves to. It’s a thoroughly wonderful read.

[@gregahunt]

thanks joan