Family sagas are my jam and so The Bee Sting was destined to be enjoyable for me. Set in a small Irish town, we follow the Barnes family. One time minor celebs of the town due to them running the local care dealership and repair shop, the recession is starting to disrupt their lives and sends the family into a tailspin.

We have Cass, a teenage overachiever in thrall to her best friend Elaine even where this may lead her astray; PJ, her younger brother who finds more comfort in online communities than in person; Imelda, their mother desperate for a life unlike the one she had growing up and Dickie, their father whose secrets will soon pitch them all into disaster.

Paul Murray did an excellent job of crafting characters that felt entirely believable, especially his teenage characters who were complicated, and likeable and unlikeable all at once. I found the mirroring of the past throughout the novel to be really interesting - we see our young people coming dangerously close to repeating the mistakes of their parents, and then maybe not. The setting that the novel takes place in also again felt very well drawn - I really got a sense of the place and the community through the (many) pages of this book.

It is a bit of a brick of a novel, and there were definitely times were it felt like the text could have been trimmed without losing any of the nuances of the novel; we spend perhaps too much time in flashbacks when he point of the sequences had already been very well established. However, I was engaged enough with the characters that I didn't want to put the book down. The ending is ambiguous, if that's something that is a dealbreaker, but it did make me say 'oh my God' out loud. Really enjoyed.