The Accidental

The award-winning novel by Booker-shortlistee Ali Smith, now a Penguin EssentialThe 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.

Winner of Whitbread Novel Award.

“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”

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

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women's Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

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