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The Bee Sting
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Heather O’Sullivan, Barry Fitzgerald, Beau Holland, Ciaran O'Brien, Lisa Caruccio Came
- Length: 26 hrs and 10 mins
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Publisher's summary
Shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize
From the author of Skippy Dies comes Paul Murray's The Bee Sting, an irresistibly funny, wise, and thought-provoking 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 Dickie is 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 and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.
If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda’s wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man?
The Bee Sting, Paul Murray’s exuberantly entertaining new novel, is a tour de force: a portrait of postcrash Ireland, a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.
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Overall
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Acclaimed author Jonathan Rosen’s haunting investigation of the forces that led his closest childhood friend, Michael Laudor, from the heights of brilliant promise to the forensic psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved. A story about friendship, love, and the price of self-delusion, The Best Minds explores the ways in which we understand—and fail to understand—mental illness.
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The Overwhelming Tragedy of Mental Illness
- By Elephants Matter on 12-30-23
By: Jonathan Rosen
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Wellness
- A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
- By: Nathan Hill
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 18 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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When Jack and Elizabeth meet as college students in the gritty '90s Chicago art scene, the two quickly join forces and hold on tight, each eager to claim a place in the thriving underground scene with an appreciative kindred spirit. Fast-forward twenty years to suburban married life, and alongside the challenges of parenting, they encounter the often-baffling pursuits of health and happiness from polyamorous would-be suitors to home-renovation hysteria.
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you have to believe it'll work
- By Alex halladay on 09-22-23
By: Nathan Hill
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The Mark and the Void
- A Novel
- By: Paul Murray
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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While marooned at his banking job in the bewilderingly damp and insular realm known as Ireland, Claude Martingale is approached by a down-on-his-luck author, Paul, looking for his next great subject. Claude finds that his life gets steadily more exciting under Paul's fictionalizing influence; he even falls in love with a beautiful waitress. But Paul's plan is not what it seems - and neither is Claude's employer, the Investment Bank of Torabundo, which swells through dodgy takeovers and derivatives trading until - well, you can probably guess how that shakes out.
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Well read but frustrating story
- By Michael on 05-26-16
By: Paul Murray
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Prophet Song
- By: Paul Lynch
- Narrated by: Gerry O'Brien
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother of four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.
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Painfully powerful Tale.
- By Tom on 01-30-24
By: Paul Lynch
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Chain Gang All Stars
- A Novel
- By: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
- Narrated by: Shayna Small, Aaron Goodson, Michael Crouch, and others
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly-popular, highly-controversial, profit-raising program in America’s increasingly dominant private prison industry. It’s the return of the gladiators and prisoners are competing for the ultimate prize: their freedom.
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Can’t wait for more from this author!
- By Brian Sheldon on 06-04-23
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If I Survive You
- By: Jonathan Escoffery
- Narrated by: Torian Brackett
- Length: 8 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In the 1970s, Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But America, as the couple and their two children learn, is far from the promised land. Excluded from society as Black immigrants, the family pushes on first through Hurricane Andrew and later the 2008 recession, living in a house so cursed that the pet fish launches itself out of its own tank rather than stay. But even as things fall apart, the family remains motivated, often to its own detriment, by what their younger son, Trelawny, calls “the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive.”
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Good except for the ending
- By Morris Nelms on 11-20-22
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Absolution
- A Novel
- By: Alice McDermott
- Narrated by: Jesse Vilinsky, Rachel Kenney
- Length: 10 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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American women—American wives—have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era’s mandate to be “helpmeets” to their ambitious husbands with their own, inchoate impulse to “do good” for the people of Vietnam.
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Hung in there for 2 1/2 hours but had to return it
- By Jackie in MI on 11-14-23
By: Alice McDermott
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The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
- A Novel
- By: James McBride
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 12 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1972, when workers in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, were digging the foundations for a new development, the last thing they expected to find was a skeleton at the bottom of a well. Who the skeleton was and how it got there were two of the long-held secrets kept by the residents of Chicken Hill, the dilapidated neighborhood where immigrant Jews and African Americans lived side by side and shared ambitions and sorrows.
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Multiple Stories Obfuscate Narrative
- By Stephnsea on 08-12-23
By: James McBride
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This Other Eden
- By: Paul Harding
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 6 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1792, formerly enslaved Benjamin Honey and his Irish wife, Patience, discover an island where they can make a life together. Over a century later, the Honeys’ descendants and a diverse group of neighbors are desperately poor, isolated, and often hungry, but nevertheless protected from the hostility awaiting them on the mainland.
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Painfully overwritten
- By WPH on 02-24-23
By: Paul Harding
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Master Slave Husband Wife
- An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
- By: Ilyon Woo
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards, Leon Nixon
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.
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Necessary story well told!
- By Marc W Rhoades on 01-19-23
By: Ilyon Woo
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Western Lane
- By: Chetna Maroo
- Narrated by: Maya Soroya
- Length: 4 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo. But on the court, she is not alone. She is with her pa. She is with Ged, a thirteen-year-old boy with his own formidable talent. She is with the players who have come before her. She is in awe.
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Quiet story that is really interesting
- By Garth on 06-11-23
By: Chetna Maroo
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Study for Obedience
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Bernstein
- Narrated by: Sarah Bernstein
- Length: 3 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him. Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs - collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog's phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies 'just beyond the garden gate.'
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Interesting and Unsettling
- By Tommy on 03-28-24
By: Sarah Bernstein
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Biography of X
- A Novel
- By: Catherine Lacey
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 14 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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When X—an iconoclastic artist and shape-shifter—falls dead in her office, her widow CM, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing X's biography. Though X was recognized as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. In CM's quest to unravel it, she opens a Pandora’s box of secrets and destruction. All the while, she immerses herself in the history of the Southern Territory, a fascist theocracy that split from the rest of the country after World War II, as it is finally, in the present day, forced into an uneasy reunification.
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Worst book I’ve ever read
- By Rebecca on 11-09-23
By: Catherine Lacey
What listeners say about The Bee Sting
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- miri novogrodsky
- 11-17-23
Stunning reminder of our humanness
Gorgeous performances of a brilliant story, brimming with distinct voices, heartaches and secrets. Threaded with loneliness and drenched in shame and the lengths we’ll go to avoid being seen. Oh, and the fallibility of parenting, the trauma we being to our children, the losses they shoulder from our pasts, the crisis of our planet and crisis of our hearts. Worth every second. A big reminder to speak your truth and love your children.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 02-02-24
Wonderful writing. Tough storyline
I had trouble with zero redeeming characters (Save perhaps PJ). I kept going thinking there would be something to take with me at the end but I didn’t walk away with anything other than pity for all of them.
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2 people found this helpful
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- CoffeeAndBooks
- 12-03-23
Nothing moves a person like great literature.
I read this as a combo alongside the text. Loved the narration. It took me longer as a result, but was worth it.
This story is so layered. So intense. So deeply moving.
I could see myself in each character in some way… that’s the hallmark of great literature- it highlights universal themes.
Amazing narration.
Well flushed out executed story.
Just phenomenal.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Elizabeth Hall
- 01-02-24
Really good characters. Liked the mix.
I was riveted. I really liked the way they were all interlinked at the end, but….. what on earth happened? Didn’t get it . Suddenly the narrative stopped. Don’t mind musings, but enquiring minds want to know….. It was an exercise in human misery, I desperately wanted something good to happen to someone…. Still I recommend it.
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- M. Adler
- 01-05-24
Long and rambling
Characters are well done, but the story jumps all over among them and back and forth in time. I stuck with it and felt cheated by the lack of resolution at the end.
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- Idk
- 12-22-23
Disappointing Ending
I really enjoyed this book, but the ending felt almost unfair after the amount of time I invested in listening.
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- Niamh
- 12-10-23
Who am I in this story?
Cliff hanger.
I need soooo much more information. If words on paper are to evoke, Paul did his job well.
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- Susie Vegan
- 12-20-23
Brilliant
Couldn’t stop listening and was excited to start a new each day. So well written
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- Tree Hugger
- 02-05-24
Frustrating
My stress level rose each time I listened to another chapter of this lengthy book. I looked forward to being done with it, but when the end came, I swore out loud. What a disappointment. It's as though the author couldn't figure out how to wrap it up and just quit.
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- kelly l dauka
- 01-26-24
How long it took for the tide to turn in the story
The end , so much detail in the beginning, but the ending was so abrupt, I expected a little bit more
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