The Bee Sting: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023

in your

I joined a walking group. I’d always loved nature, but I’d kept it a closely guarded secret. Just the idea of being seen in an anorak! But I started going out with this group every Sunday. Sometimes during the week too. They were mostly retirees, and really there was no point me trying to impress them with my repartee because half of them had heari

we seem to be faced with an impossible dilemma: if we don’t want to be killed by climate change, we have to stop being ourselves. You can see why people aren’t exactly rushing to man the barricades. The thought of addressing it actually seems in some ways worse to us than being killed by it. Or put it another way, the thought of no longer being our

self-abnegating

Imelda had forgotten all about Dolly and Frank’s supposed business She hadn’t seen him in months But he came to her now and told her how a few weeks ago he’d met a lad from Sligo who was selling a load of hash It was the deal of the century he told her He’d gone to Frank and together they went in on a kilo and the plan was to sell it on and use the

You couldn’t protect the people you loved – that was the lesson of history, and it struck him therefore that to love someone meant to be opened up to a radically heightened level of suffering.

We’re all different, but we all think everyone else is the same, he said. If they taught us that in school, I feel like the world would be a much happier place.