2 good books

The Bee Sting | Worry

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (2023)

The Barnes family is down on their luck. Dickie is working long hours at the once-lucrative car lot and garage his father founded, Imelda is selling off jewelry, and their two children, Cass and PJ, are dealing with the repercussions of a fall from status at school.

Told in turn from the perspective of each family member, The Bee Sting follows the Barnes family through their current struggles while also unpacking clues from their pasts. Imelda, for her part, will not go back to the poverty and violence she grew up in and Dickie is dealing with the demons of a former self he thought he’d left back at university.

Through all their personal struggles, they try to find ways to come back to each other. After contemplating the advances of another man in town, Imelda decides to give Dickie one more shot after months of avoiding each other. With nowhere else to turn, young PJ takes a dangerous journey to find Cass in the city and let her know how bad things are at home. And Dickie, seeing fewer and fewer ways out, prepares to make an ultimate sacrifice.

Worry by Alexandra Tanner (2024)

As the author tweeted when Publisher’s Marketplace announced her deal, “i wrote a novel called WORRY!!!! it’s about being worried.” And so it is.

In 2019 Brooklyn, Jules takes in her younger sister, Poppy. Poppy is trying to find her way in the world, only about a year removed from a suicide attempt that only Jules knows about. Jules is really in no place to be a model for her younger sister as she’s doing a little too much doom-scrolling trying to escape her own worries — her mother’s new fixation with conspiracy theories, her ex-boyfriend finally moving on, the M.F.A. in fiction that so far has only qualified her to write study guides of classic novels for high school students.

As they cycle through turns as each other’s antagonists and advocates, they have to decide if they really want to be in each other’s lives or if playing house in this new stage of their lives is just the same thing with a different roof over it.