Paul Murray Press Reviews
It can't be overstated how purely pleasurable The Bee Sting is to read. Murray's brilliant new novel, about a rural Irish clan, posits the author as Dublin's answer to Jonathan Franzen . . . A 650-page slab of compulsive high-grade entertainment, The Bee Sting oozes pathos while being very funny to boot . . . Murray's observational gifts and A-game phrase-making render almost every page - every line, it sometimes seems - abuzz with fresh and funny insights . . . At its core this is a novel concerned with the ties that bind, secrets and lies, love and loss. They're all here, brought to life with captivating vigour in a first-class performance to cherish -- Anthony Cummins - Observer
The Bee Sting is the finest novel that Murray has yet written and will surely be one of the books of 2023 . . . It bears comparison to the brilliant comic writer Jonathan Coe... But Murray is his own writer, capable of keeping a multi-faceted and compulsive plot moving along with alacrity and confidence, while seamlessly blending drama, comedy and heartbreak... For 13 years, Paul Murray has been best known as the author of Skippy Dies. That, I suspect, is about to change - Sunday Independent
Expertly foreshadowed and so intricately put together, a brilliantly funny, deeply sad portrait of an Irish family in crisis . . . Murray is triumphantly back on home turf - troubled adolescents, regretful adults, secrets signposted and exquisitely revealed, each line soaked in irony ranging from the gentle to the savage . . . We live though hundreds of pages on tenterhooks, and the suspense and revelations keep coming until the end [...] He is brilliant on fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, grief, self-sabotage and self-denial, as well as the terrible weakness humans have for magical thinking... A tragicomic triumph, you won't read a sadder, truer, funnier novel this year -- Justine Jordan - Guardian
An immersive, brilliantly structured, beautifully written mega-tonne that is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is deeply disturbing . . . Paul Murray, the undisputed reigning champion of epic Irish tragicomedy, has done it again . . . The Bee Sting is as ambitious as anything that has gone before, but with a focus and shape that grants it great depth as well as breadth. Seriously, all you need is this, your suntan lotion and a few days off work and you're good to go . . . I didn't see the plot twists coming. And they keep on coming, And coming again . . . This is too short a review to describe a book so dense yet so compelling. I began with an ovation. I'll end abruptly, and in awe -- Ian Samson - The Spectator
A triumph from Irish writer Paul Murray, even better than his 2010 cult story of school life, Skippy Dies . . . I was reminded, while engrossed in this tragicomic saga, of EM Forster's observation: Long books, when read, are usually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince himself and others that he has not wasted his time. But The Bee Sting deserves all the praise I am heaping on it. It is generous, immersive, sharp-witted and devastating; the sort of novel that becomes a friend for life -- John Self - Financial Times
No one writes tragicomedy as good as this . . . Both brilliant entertainment and a penetrating look at the human condition, as heavy with pathos as it is rich with humour. And if 650 pages asks a lot of the reader, in this case it more than delivers - i
Delightfully rackety, raucously funny... Ideology takes a backseat here to feeling - doubt, guilt, lust, longing... The Bee Sting is on a par with Skippy Dies, Murray's most beloved book, and certainly exceeds it in ambition. A masterpiece - Irish Independent
Bold [and] expansive . . . Paul Murray is consistently inventive, observant and funny. He is on intimate terms with this preteen boy, this teenage girl, this lost middle-aged man and this semi-educated woman, and he knows how to make them vivid . . . The pages turn rapidly as farce and tragedy converge, the latter threatening to get the upper hand - Times Literary Supplement
This novel is as generous, expansive, and glorious as a cathedral, as intimate as pillow-talk, and as funny and heartbreaking as nothing you've read before. Paul Murray may just be the most spellbinding storyteller writing today. A magisterial piece of work -- Neel Mukherjee, author of 'The Lives of Others' Murray is a natural storyteller who knows when to withhold, to indulge, to surprise. He specialises, like Dickens, in lengthy sagas that are mammoth in scope, generous with detail and backstory, flush with humour and colourful characters, all of it steeped in social realism . . . Stylistically, The Bee Sting is an ambitious, expansive novel. There are shifts in perspective, tone, voice, era and milieu . . . The Bee Sting is hugely entertaining tragicomic fiction -- Sarah Gilmartin - The Irish Times
Paul Murray's patter is so fluid, funny and clever . . . There's laughter in every other line, but there's also a compassion and a midlife wisdom at work . . . As events unfold - no sentence a chore or lacking in bounce - it becomes apparent that the novel is also exceptionally smartly structured. Quirky details strike back later in the narrative, with unexpected force . . . the writing never loses vitality -- Paul Genders - Literary Review
Paul Murray's new novel, The Bee Sting, is funny, dark, moving and deeply humane. It's also driven by an inexorable tragic force, and Murray's intricate narrative dexterity makes it very easy to keep turning all those hundreds of pages -- Mark O'Connell - Guardian
Carefully paced, brilliantly convincing and helped along by plenty of subtle satire . . . a huge, marbled wagyu steak of a novel that ranges confidently from humane to horrifying. It's a classic family saga in the mode of The Corrections or The Sound and the Fury . . . Murray delights in taking a stock type -- the sullen pubescent, the frazzled mother -- and exploding it with ambiguity and empathy . . . An immensely enjoyable piece of expert craftsmanship -- James Riding - The Times
A family lurches into financial and emotional crisis in full view of judgmental neighbours in this astute, remorselessly funny novel about how people are invariably more complex than they first appear . . . Murray tackles some of the biggest issues facing our society in a thoughtful, tragicomic novel exploring smalltown society and social class -- Huston Gilmore - Daily Mirror
This bumper novel is already gaining plaudits as the book of the summer, and if it's a meaty, heart punching, expertly executed family saga you need this August, then you can stop the search now . . . Murray delivers scarcely a duff sentence in a 600-page novel that's pure unadulterated pleasure. It's been compared to Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections; I'd argue it's better than that -- Claire Allfree - Daily Mail
Breathtaking, blackly comic, Murray's style is entirely and distinctively his own . . . Handling the plot as if it were a Rubik cube, [he] gives each character their voice in a carousel of first-person accounts, tracking backwards and into the present . . . The Bee Sting is an immersion in the tragedy of what-might-have-been -- Rosemary Goring - Herald
The tale of a dysfunctional family trying to hold things together. It's a thing of beauty, a novel that will fill your heart -- Alex Preston - Observer, 'Fiction to look out for in 2023'
This epic, many-layered tragicomedy of an Irish family in crisis is as pleasurable to read as it is emotionally devastating - Guardian, '2023 Summer Reads'
I experienced just about every possible human emotion while reading The Bee Sting, and at an intensity I have not felt with a work of fiction for a long time. Its ambition and scale are astonishing, and as a sheer technical feat of storytelling it is remarkable. Reading it, I was constantly reminded of what the novel as an artform is capable of, and what it is for. It might be a bold claim to make, of the author of Skippy Dies, that this new book is the best thing Paul Murray has ever done - but I'm making it anyway, because it's true -- Mark O'Connell, author of 'To Be A Machine' Paul Murray is my favourite young Irish novelist and The Bee Sting confirms all of his talents. Settle in for a hilarious whirlwind of a familial socioeconomic misadventure as only Murray would write it -- Gary Shteyngart, author of 'Super Sad True Love Story' The idea of being swept up and spat out by falsehoods runs through much of Murray's work . . . There are storylines about doomsday preppers and local GAA teams; themes of class, economic collapse, ecological catastrophe . . . Murray's conversations have an expansive tendency. A single thread can lead him outwards in a web of connections, metaphors, jokes, before he lands smoothly back on the point -- Niamh Donnelly - The Irish Times
Utterly absorbing . . . Every perfectly tooled sentence slips down as cleanly as an ice-cold Negroni - Daily Mail '2023 Summer Reads'
