Top 10 books. Captivating characters and story. Don’t be put off by its length.

The Bee Sting is the story of the Barnes family in Midlands Ireland after the economic crash of 2008. Dickie, the father, runs a garage, once successful and now seriously failing, and the family's struggles are narrated successively by his teenage daughter Cass, her younger brother PJ, their mother Imelda and finally by Dickie. Each character has a distinctive voice and literary style, and each is wrestling with secrets and conflicts that they cannot resolve, under the cloud of a gathering crisis of climate disaster that threatens their existence as their personal agonies consume them from within. Murray is a master of plotting, of concealment and revelation, as he builds the novel to an excruciating climax told from different perspectives by all four Barnes family members. The themes, of denial of one's true self, of familial pain carried down the generations, and of an almost fairytale curse on a family trying and failing to love one another, are expertly woven by the author with masterful daftness and control. None of this expresses how funny the novel is, with laugh-out-loud moments along with lashings of irony and multiple perspectives that serve only to show how far from understanding each other and themselves the family are. I'm reluctant to share elements of the plot as it is so skilfully calibrated, but Murray can conjure the interiority of a teenage girl as beautifully as her mother, tortured by her tragic past, a child doing his best to save his family, or the doom-prepping Dickie, haunted by ghosts and desires he's built a life to avoid. An all-consuming read that will simultaneously delight and destroy you.

This is the first novel of Paul Murray's that I have read, and it certainly won't be the last. This is the second large novel I have read in succession, but I barely noticed the length. In fact, towards the end I wanted more pages, I was enjoying it so much. The very first page begins with black comedy that is genuinely - to use a cliche - laugh out loud funny. What then evolves is a glorious family saga, moving, witty, tragic, and exquisitely insightful. I cannot recommend more highly.

This is an intimate, skillfully crafted and funny epic of a book. It tells the story of a family in Ireland who suffer financial loss following the economic crash and face selling their car dealership business. How each member of the family deals with this collapse is completely different as they have their own ambitions, fears and ways of coping. In size, this is a hefty read at over six hundred pages. In storytelling, The Bee Sting is just as hefty. The book is told in sections from the four members of the family, starting with the teenage daughter as she prepares to off to university in the next few months. Before she goes she wants to experience life so she doesn't turn up un-knowledgeable about life. So, with her manipulative friend, she tries out drinking, boyfriends...the usual stuff. She can't wait to escape the life in her small hometown, where everyone knows everyone. Her fear is that the financial crisis means that she can't leave. The next part is from her twelve-year-old brother point of view. His fear is that his parents will divorce and he will be sent to boarding school, which he doesn't want. His other challenge is avoiding a bully and balancing life against games. These two sections are my favourite. They are witty, clever and relatable. The whole book is written with reduced punctuation, particularly inverted commas, with the bizarre exception of exclamation marks, but the third section from the children's mother doesn't have full stops either (but does have capital letters to indicate the start of a new sentence). This style indicates the mental state of the woman, with her anxiety and regrets driving her thoughts. It does have the effect of racing, breathless, disjointed thinking but loses a bit because the text has to be read slowly to make it comprehensible. This section is also very long: about a third of the size of a typical novel. As we move through the book, sections and chapters become shorter and more urgent; by the end it reads like a play. Perspective changes from first and third person to the second. All very clever, unnecessary, but clever. A powerful, immersive book about family, fathers, identity and social class; tragedy, shame, denial, cause and effect and how the small things impact the present, where the family mirrors the world. Murray has a grasp on the English language, an original expressive voice that, when mixed with his visceral knowledge of humanity, is truly mesmerising. A fantastic read, highly recommended.​

Here are my immediate thoughts after just finishing The Bee Sting, such a powerful book that I felt almost as though I had been stung by a bee at the end! It is a chunky book, but don’t be put off by this because it reads almost like a thriller, following the members of the Barnes family, formerly affluent owners of a car dealership, hit by the economy. The narrative swaps between father Dickie, mother Imelda and their children, Cass and PJ, and Paul Murray captures all of these voices superbly. Although the story begins with the feel of a family saga, it rapidly becomes something much darker, a kaleidoscopic box of secrets with repeated images, and the underlying sense of a twisted fairy tale. Paranoia, climate change, depression and a horrific scene of sexual violence run alongside the events of a small Irish town, which has the feel of Twin Peaks. All of these characters wear masks and no one is quite what they seem. The writing is tremendous, moving through Imelda’s narrative that has no punctuation, and each section becoming shorter and more urgent as it builds to a compelling crescendo, like a storm breaking. I defy anyone to stop reading this book towards the end. Difficult, violent, Shakespearean, brilliant, terrifying, at times tender, with echoes of Young Mungo - I am not at all surprised this was shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize.