The Art of Reading Book Club with Colm Tóibín | Episode 26 'The Bee Sting' by Paul Murray

The Arts Council Podcast

The March Art of Reading book club features Laureate for Irish Fiction Colm Tóibín in conversation with writer Paul Murray about his novel ‘The Bee Sting’ “Paul Murray’s novel is narrated by four members of the Barnes family, Dickie who runs a car showroom, his wife Imelda, and their children Cassie and PJ. The Guardian has written that Murray ‘is brilliant on fathers and sons, sibling rivalry, grief, selfsabotage and self-denial, as well as the terrible weakness humans have for magical thinking…’” — Colm Tóibín Paul Murray was born in Dublin and is the author of four acclaimed novels. An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003) was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award. Skippy Dies (2010) was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa Book. The Mark and the Void (2015) won the Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. The Bee Sting, published in 2023, won the An Post Irish Book of the Year (2023) and the Nero Book Award (2024). It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize and the Writers’ Prize (2024). It was one of the Top Ten Best Books of 2023 in The New York Times and The Washington Post, and named a Best Book of the Year by The Irish Times, The New Yorker, Time, The Independent, and others. Paul’s stories and journalism have appeared in New York Magazine, Granta, The Guardian, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. Learn more about the Art of Reading Book Club and the Laureate for Irish Fiction programme: https://www.artscouncil.ie/Arts-in-Ireland/Literature/Laureate-for-Irish-Fiction/The-Art-of-Reading-Book-Club/