The Bee Sting - Paul Murray
A Reading and Conversation with the Author
in partnership with Politics & Prose Bookstore
When: Tuesday, October 29th, 2024 at 7:00pm
Where: Politics & Prose Bookstore (5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008)
Price: This event is free with first-come, first-serve seating.
Join us for an intimate reading and conversation with author Paul Murray discussing his new novel, The Bee Sting.
Copies of The Bee Sting will be available for purchase on site during the event.
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?
Listed as One of The New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year, Winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year, the Nero Gold Prize, and the Nero Book Award for Fiction as well as Shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Writers' Prize for Fiction, Paul Murray’s exuberantly entertaining new novel The Bee Sting, 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.
Bee Sting is one of the most exciting novels to come out of Ireland in the last year, listed as 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, and named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, The Economist, New York Public Library, BBC, and more.
About the Author
Paul Murray was born in 1975 in Dublin. He is the author of the novels An Evening of Long Goodbyes, which was short-listed for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies (2010) was long-listed for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The Mark and the Void (2015) was the joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was named one of Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of the year.
