Hello, summer! This is it. If you have been waiting for your big holiday read, finally here it is: an immersive, brilliantly structured, beautifully written mega-tome that is as laugh-out-loud funny as it is deeply disturbing. It is never a good idea to begin a review (or indeed to end one) with a round of applause unless you want to sound like a complete pushover or a total patsy, but full credit where it’s due: Paul Murray, the undisputed reigning champion of epic Irish tragicomedy, has done it again.

He did it first with An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003), which read as if a young, Irish P.G. Wodehouse were frantically rewriting A Confederacy of Dunces. He did it again with Skippy Dies (2010), a novel as long as it was good and almost as good as it was long, and which won a lot of praise and almost a lot of prizes. His The Mark and the Void (2015) was perhaps a little too much, in several senses: a meta-novel about high finance, bursting with so many ideas about literature, art and money that it eventually became a bit of a bore. The Bee Sting is as ambitious as anything that has gone before, but with a focus and shape that grants it great depth as well as breadth. Seriously, all you need is this, your suntan lotion and a few days off work and you’re good to go.

The book tells the story from the various points of view of the Barnes family – father Dickie, mother Imelda, daughter Cass and son PJ – who live in a typical small town in Ireland where everyone knows everyone and everyone knows your business: ‘When you walked down the street people would slow down their cars to see who you were so they could wave at you.’ This turns out to be not such a good thing, particularly when Dickie’s previously lucrative VW dealership starts to run into trouble. Exactly how and why it does is the matter of the book and the mark of Murray’s genius. I’m no ingenue and not, I think, naive when it comes to writers’ tricks and sleights of hand, but I didn’t see the plot twists coming. And they keep on coming. And coming again.

During the course of the novel we get to see Cass complete her Leaving Cert and go to Trinity College, Dublin; we learn the truth about Imelda and Dickie’s marriage; we are vividly confronted with Dickie’s many secrets; PJ comes of age; and just when you think that things can’t get any worse, there’s a final plunge towards tragedy. This is an ordinary world, vivid and familiar, in which every character is pursued – like Cass – by ‘a marauding shadow-self that choked the very world she lived in’. This is too short a review to describe a book so dense yet so compelling. I began with an ovation. I’ll end abruptly, and in awe.