The 5 Books That Inspired Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting 

Paul Murray is the author of the Irish epic The Bee Sting – Dua’s Monthly Read for February for the Service95 Book Club. His novel tells the engrossing saga of the Barnes family through the shifting lenses of mum Imelda, dad Dickie, and their children Cass and PJ (discover more in his Q&A with Dua here). Here, Paul shares the five books that inspired his masterful novel...

1. Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich

“This is the fall of the Soviet Union presented as a kind of jigsaw or mosaic of individual anecdotes and accounts. Alexeivich travels through the ruins of the empire, gathering the experiences of people who lived through the collapse. Told in their own words, their stories are sometimes hair-raising, sometimes hilarious, always deeply human. From a writerly point of view, the lesson is that there’s no such thing as ordinary people: the folks ahead of you in the checkout line at Tesco have enough material for a dozen novels.”

2. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

“If I could only keep two sentences from all of Western literature, they’d be William Faulkner’s: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ That’s from Requiem For A Nun, but As I Lay Dying inhabits the same terrain. It’s a Gothic road trip about a family journeying through the badlands of Mississipi with their mother’s coffin. Different family members take turns to tell the story, with each contradicting the other. I first read this when I was 15 and it blew my mind. It’s shorter and easier than some of Faulkner’s other novels, and unexpectedly funny.”

3. Her Husband: Hughes And Plath – A Marriage by Diane Middlebrook

“I didn’t have to do as much research for The Bee Sting as for some of my other novels, but Sylvia Plath is a talismanic figure in Cass’ sections, so as well as a deep dive into her collected poems, I read this account of her turbulent, tortured relationship with Ted Hughes. Plath has come in and out of my life since I was in college; The Bell Jar was a really important book for me, as well as her Journals. Middlebrook’s biography made me think about marriage as a concept, which became central to The Bee Sting, but there were also some surprising discoveries – e.g. that Sylvia and Ted kept bees when they lived in Devon, and that Sylvia’s father Otto was an entomologist who wrote a book about bees. Research sometimes throws up these little miraculous synchronicities – when you’re losing faith in a project, they help you to keep believing.”

4. Collapse by Jared Diamond

“It always surprises me how un-freaked out people are about impending ecological catastrophe. Diamond’s book, which should be stapled to the hand of everyone attending the next COP summit, describes – in cool, scientific prose – the disintegration of a series of civilisations that thought they would go on forever, from the Mayas to Easter Island. A lot of the time, this can be put down to the hubris, not to say sheer stupidity, of their leaders, who if they were alive today would no doubt be clamouring for more AI data centres.”

5. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

“Ferrante’s sublime Neapolitan quartet, of which this is the first part, is driven by the fissile friendship between studious, dutiful Lenu and mercurial, prodigious Lina. Everything is so vivid here – the dank, claustrophobic neighbourhood where the girls live, the oddities, lushes, priests and crooks who inhabit it, the twists and turns of adolescence. But it’s the relationship between the two girls – Lenu’s burning, impossible desire to be Lina, Lina’s need to break free from every conceivable restriction on her – that gives their coming-of-age the dimensions of Shakespearean tragedy.”