One of The New York Times Top 10 Books of 2023 Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023 Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and the 2023 Nero Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction One of The New Yorker's ...

Murray's novel is tale of shifting perspectives, in which we examine the Barnes family, a once-well-off household that's come on hard economic times and is being to fall apart. Murray takes us through a series of limited viewpoints of each of the four family members, giving us access to their opinions and histories and showing how many secrets they are all keeping from each other. Everyone in NUBClub thought that the general project was great. Each of us could point to individual moments that we loved, with some favorites being Cass (the daughters) living through her infatuation with her shallow, manipulative friend; Imelda (the mother) falling in love with Frank, or Dickie (the father) having a relationship in college. Interestingly, we differed on which ones we liked -- about half of NUBClub thought Dickie's story was incredible and found the style of Imelda's section painful to read, while the other half really liked Imelda's story but thought Dickie's was overly tortuous. Murray takes liberties in the story to create coincidences for dramatic effect, having people run into each other or end up in the same place, and there's a background of magical realism in the book with characters who can see the future and possible spells cast through charms. Sarah pointed out this was a nod to Greek tragedy in Murray's work and thus made sense -- others of us found some of the twists, notably P.J. (the son) falling in with some kind of older predator online, too contrived to believe. This led us to the main point of contention -- the novel's ending. Murray foreshadows where the story is going, but where we spilt hard was whether that made the ending fitting or painfully obvious. Most of us felt that Murray dropped the ball in the end, but that didn't hurt everyone's recommendation of The Bee Sting. There are some beautiful passages and amazing storytelling in this book. It's not perfect, but almost all of us found at least one part of the book that we thought was brilliant.