Why The Bee Sting should be this year’s Booker Prize winner

There’s a buzz about one particular novel on this year’s Booker shortlist. Ahead of next week’s winner announcement, John Self explains why Irish writer Paul Murray’s joyously readable 656-page tragicomic family saga is the rightful favourite

Paul Murray’s ‘The Bee Sting’ is favourite to win this year’s Booker (Getty)

With less than two weeks to go before the winner of this year’s Booker Prize for fiction is announced, it’s time – to adopt a cliche surely no Booker novelist would consider – to nail our colours to the mast. This year’s shortlist is not a bad mix, featuring three men called Paul, two women, and one “novel” that is really a collection of stories.

But seeing the discussions on social media and in the press – not to mention reading the actual books – we conclude that there can be only one true result. Whatever the outcome of the judges’ deliberations on 26 November, the People’s Prizewinner must be The Bee Sting by Paul Murray.

Murray, a 47-year-old Irish novelist, has been here before – almost. His cult novel of school life, Skippy Dies, was longlisted in 2010. But he publishes big books that take a long time to write, and 656-pager The Bee Sting is only his second novel since then (and his fourth overall). It was worth the wait. The Bee Sting is far and away the most entertaining of the novels on this year’s Booker shortlist, a fat slab of joyous readability – but which doesn’t stint on emotional depth.