The Bee Sting is thought-provoking, sharp witted, tour de force about family, fortune and the struggle to be a good person when the world is falling apart.

The Bee Sting by Irish writer Paul Murray, is the tale of a man who destroys himself in order to please others, but ends up destroying them too.

The Barnes family is in trouble . Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under –  but rather than face the music, he’s 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, while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to bridge-drink her way through her final exams. Twelve-year old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

A path of ice on the tarmac, a casual favor to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil- can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life?

The bee sting in question has become family shorthand for an accident that almost disrupted a weeding – but it turned out to be a lie.

The family in the contemporary rural Ireland, are Dickie and Imelda Barnes and their children Cass and PJ. The first 500 pages take us through each family member’s story in a long uninterrupted stretch, so we get to know them in depth. School-leaver Cass just wants to get to university in Dublin, “Where everyone doesn’t look like they’re made of mashed potato”.

Young brother PJ lives online and panics about school bullies. Imelda reflects on her marriage to Dickie, which rose from the ashes of her relationship with his dead brother Frank, And Dickie’s life is  centered on the family’s failing car sales business, continues to be  governed by the fallout of Frank’s death: the brother he could never live up to, because he could never be him.

As skippy dies showed, Murray excels at the confusions and  comedy of young adulthood, and the intensity of teenage friendship. The power dynamics between parents and children, the love of money, and the ways society tries to make boys into men.

Dickie digs a bunker with a prepper friend as Imelda calls then doom and doomer. Murray can be both funny and sad, as Dickie returns to a pub that in his student days was known as “Jurassic Park”.

E.M. Fosters observation: “Long books, when read, are unusually overpraised, because the reader wishes to convince himself and others that he has not waster is time”.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, Hamish Hamilton  £18.99, 656 pages.