One of The New York Times Top 10 Books of 2023 Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year 2023 and the 2023 Nero Book Award for Fiction Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and the 2024 Writers' Prize for Fiction Finalist for the 2023 Kirkus Prize for Fiction One of The New Yorker's Essential Reads of 2023. One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Books of 2023. One of TIME's 10 Best Fiction Books of the Year. Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Economist, New York Public Library, BBC, and more. From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking tour de force about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart. The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away. If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda’s wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man? The Bee Sting, Paul Murray’s exuberantly entertaining new novel, is a tour de force: a portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.

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.