The Bee Sting

Irresistibly funny, wise and thought-provoking - a tragicomic 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 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 jewellery on eBay while their teenage daughter Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge-drink her way to her final exams.

And twelve-year-old PJ is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home.

Where did it all go wrong? A patch of ice on the tarmac, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil - can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? And if the story has already been written - is there still time to find a happy ending?


One of the most gifted novelists of his generation... Funny, angry, and unputdownable' Daily Express


'I've never read anything like it...

One of the few true masterpieces of this young century' Marlon James on Skippy Dies

'Sensationally good... A wild, intelligent, angry, witty, uproariously funny, devastating novel' Neel Mukherjee on The Mark and the Void

'Savagely funny, brimful of wit, energy, poetry and vision, unflaggingly entertaining. A triumph' Sunday Times on Skippy Dies

'Wildly ambitious, scabrously funny, deeply humane' The Bookseller on The Mark and the Void