Rachel Seiffert: The Bee Sting

April’s Book of the Month was chosen by Rachel Seiffert. Rachel has published five novels, Once The Deed Is Done, A Boy in Winter, The Dark Room, Afterwards, and The Walk Home, and one collection of short stories, Field Study. Her novels have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Dublin/IMPAC Award, and longlisted three times for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, most recently in 2018.

She has also received awards from the American Society of Arts and Letters and the Association of Jewish Libraries and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Rachel teaches writing in a wide variety of settings including universities and as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.

Rachel’s Book of the Month is The Bee Sting by Paul Murray.

‘This is a proper page turner, equally funny and tragic.   PJ is thirteen and full of YouTube facts and existential angst; his sister Cas is in her last school year, desperate to be clever and pretty and far away in Dublin. Their dad Dickie Barnes is kind, but he’s run the family car business into the ground, and is trying – and failing – to keep this on the down-low. Their mum Imelda is a force of nature, exasperated by her husband, mystified by her children, she’s keeping the household afloat by selling off her shoes and bags, hush-hush, on eBay.  But in their small Irish town, everyone knows everyone, and secrets run deep through the generations.  In the boom years, folk bought cars, built houses, but now the wheels are falling off the economy and off everyone’s lives. And underlying everything is the mad story behind the bee sting in the title…’

Thank you to Rachel Seiffert for recommending this book!

Every Book of the Month is sent to each of our projects with a bookplate sharing why it was chosen. You can order your copy of The Bee Sting and our previous Books of the Month from our affiliate list on Bookshop.org: