New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Dua Lipa's Service95 Book Club has shared details about February's Monthly Read, The Bee
Sting by Paul Murray. The Service95 Book Club will provide exclusive content from Dua and Paul throughout the month on service95.com and across socials.
On The Bee Sting, Dua says, "For a masterclass in building tension, look no further than this book. It's a family saga set in modern Ireland, following the Barnes family - mother Imelda, father Dickie, 18-year-old Cass and 12-year-old PJ. Thanks to almost Shakespearean levels of miscommunication, we witness this seemingly normal family misfire at every turn until they become isolated from the small community they live in - and each other."
Dua adds, "Paul Murray absolutely nails the loneliness of childhood and teenage years, and the ways in which acting normal on the surface can conceal the darkest of secrets. Every character is flawed but no-one is judged - in fact, there is an abundance of empathy in this novel. But this might not be enough to save the Barnes family."
"As the book builds pace, it sucks you into a whirlpool of tension, where all escape routes are cut off. The result: a grand finale that will leave you sweating. It's genius!" Dua ends.
Amongst this month's Service95 Book Club content is an author Q&A between Dua and Paul, where they explore the suffocating theocracy of 1990s Ireland. They also discuss the corrosive secrets that can live within families, the loneliness of childhood, and the book's nail-biting ending. Readers can watch the interview here.
Additional content this month includes Paul's recommended reading list alongside a curated playlist of tracks that inspired him while writing. For helpful context, Paul has also shared a guide to Dublin based on the locations in the book.
Dua's Service95 Book Club is the latest offering from her Service95 platform, which consists of the At Your Service podcast and the flagship Service95 newsletter. Service95 has been praised by The Guardian as "some of the most thought-provoking short-form cultural writing you can find," and the podcast has been lauded by The Sunday Times, Vogue and Vulture. In addition, Spotify named it one of the Best Podcasts of 2022, and praised Dua as "an incredibly thoughtful interviewer with a genuine interest in people, social movements, and the arts."
You can follow Service95 on socials and YouTube to get the latest, and subscribe to the newsletter here to stay in the loop on upcoming monthly reads.
Paul was born in South Dublin in 1975, and it's still home. He is also the author of An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Skippy Dies, and The Mark and the Void, and contemporary Ireland is his canvass. Paul says, "When I was growing up, Ireland seemed so removed and detached from everything, and writing about it seemed such a boring prospect if you wanted to be, you know, Don DeLillo. Now, Ireland's right at the centre of global capitalism. Everything's happening here. Much of it bad." He started The Bee
Sting at the end of 2017 as Trump, Brexit, Bolsonaro and the impact of climate change hit, but he says he felt happy while writing the huge family saga. "I could just dump all of my sadness into the book and then go off and have a sandwich and feel fine." All of Paul's novels have been shortlisted for major awards, and The Mark and the Void won the Everyman Wodehouse Prize where the prize was a Gloucester Old Spot pig. The Bee
Sting won the Nero Book of the Year Award and the An Post Irish Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Writers' Prize for Fiction and the Kirkus Prize for Fiction.
3x GRAMMY and 7x BRIT Award-winning global pop powerhouse
Dua Lipa continues to be one of pop music's leading forces with the release of her third album, Radical Optimism. The album went No. 1 in 12 countries, including the UK where it became the biggest album debut from a UK female artist in 2024 and garnered the highest week one sales from a UK female artist since 2021. In the US, the album debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Top Album Sales chart and No. 2 on the Billboard 200 chart, marking Dua's biggest sales week yet. The New York Times named it a Critic's Pick and hailed it as "an album of nonstop ear candy," along with Variety, who declared it "a joyous blast of pop savvy," The New Yorker, who praised, "the instrumentation is a gleaming and impenetrable expanse, and the main attraction is Lipa," and Vogue, who raved it is "a summary, self-assured slice of pop brilliance…[and] catchy as hell." Following her electric set headlining Glastonbury's Pyramid Stage, performing "An Evening With" at London's Royal Albert Hall, and kicking off her Radical Optimism World Tour in Asia, Dua's world tour resumes this March, including two shows at Wembley Stadium that sold out immediately.
