The award-winning novel by Booker-shortlistee Ali Smith, now a Penguin Essential
The Smart family's lacklustre holiday in Norwich is turned upside down when a beguiling stranger called Amber appears, bringing with her love, joy, pain and upheaval. The Smarts try to make sense of their bewildering emotions as Amber tramples over family boundaries and forces them to think about their world and themselves in an entirely new way. The Accidental is at once a mysterious web of secret identities and a ruthlessly honest look at the silent cracks that can develop unnoticed in relationships over time.
About the Author
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962.
She is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, The First Person and Other Stories, There but for the, Artful, How to be Both, and Public Library and other stories.
Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize. How to be Both won the Baileys Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Folio Prize.
Autumn was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.
Industry Reviews
Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious, exhilaratingly sharp-eyed . . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh
* Sunday Telegraph *
Joyous, a shot across the bows . . . writing as rapture, as giddy delight
* The Times *
An astonishing book - funny and moving, playful and shocking. It is what one hopes for in a modern novel, and yet it confounds all expectations. It is complex. It is beautiful. It is exhilarating. It is fiction at its most artful
* Financial Times *
A beguiling page-turner ... a brilliant creation. To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last
* Independent *
Smith's novels fizz with pyrotechnic prose, whirl-wind openings, bewitching invention
* Observer *
Exuberantly inventive ... at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark
* Sunday Times *