The Bee Sting — Paul Murray

From the author of Skippy Dies, a dazzlingly intricate and poignant tragicomedy about family, inheritance, and the struggle to be good at the end of the world.

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie is up to his armpits in debt and increasingly preoccupied with preparing for an apocalypse that may or may not be just around the corner. His wife, Imelda, has become invisible to everyone except Big Mike, a man with unsavory local connections and a long-running feud with her husband. Their teenage daughter, Cass, always at the top of her class, has started drinking and staying out late, though nobody seems to have noticed. And twelve-year-old PJ is spending more and more time online, talking to a really funny, friendly kid called Darryl who never has his camera on and wants PJ to run away from home.

Every step carries the family closer to a precipice, a moment of reckoning. It feels inevitable. But how far back would you have to go to change the story? To the day Dickie hired a beautiful, feckless young man to help him out in the garage? To the year before Cass was born, at the wedding where Dickie took the place that should have belonged to his brother? To the night Imelda was supposed to skip town but didn't? All the way back to ten-year-old Dickie standing in the summer garden, trembling before his father, learning how to be a proper man?

In The Bee Sting, Paul Murray asks: How far can you dig down into the soil of a family and still keep finding seeds? And if it's too late to change the story, is there still a chance for a happy ending?