Women's Fiction, Strangers, Truthfulness and falsehood, Women biographers, Summer resorts, England--Norfolk, Psychological fiction, Great Britain, Social conditions 

"I was born in the year of the supersonic, the era of the multistorey multivitamin multitonic, the highrise time of men with the technology and women who could be bionic, when jump-jets were Harrier, when QE2 was Cunard, when thirty-eight feet tall the Princess Margaret stood stately in her hoverpad ..." 

Explores the nature of truth, the role of fate, and the power of storytelling. This is a novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves.

Publisher Comments
The Accidental is the virtuoso new novel by the singularly gifted Ali Smith. Jonathan Safran Foer has called her writing "thrilling." Jeanette Winterson has praised her for her "style, ideas, and punch." Here, in a novel at once profound, playful, and exhilaratingly inventive, she transfixes us with a portrait of a family unraveled by a mysterious visitor.
Amber — thirtysomething and barefoot — shows up at the door of the Norfolk cottage that the Smarts are renting for the summer. She talks her way in. She tells nothing but lies. She stays for dinner.

Eve Smart, the author of a best-selling series of biographical reconstructions, thinks Amber is a student with whom her husband, Michael, is sleeping. Michael, an English professor, knows only that her car broke down. Daughter Astrid, age twelve, thinks she's her mother’s friend. Son Magnus, age seventeen, thinks she's an angel.

As Amber insinuates herself into the family, the questions of who she is and how she's come to be there drop away. Instead, dazzled by her seeming exoticism, the Smarts begin to examine the accidents of their lives through the searing lens of Amber's perceptions. When Eve finally banishes her from the cottage, Amber disappears from their sight, but not — they discover when they return home to London — from their profoundly altered lives.

Fearlessly intelligent and written with an irresistible blend of lyricism and whimsy, The Accidental is a tour de force of literary improvisation that explores the nature of truth, the role of chance, and the transformative power of storytelling.

Review
"Ms. Smith is a wonderful ventriloquist, adept at throwing her voice into an astonishing array of characters....[S]he captures their thoughts, their dream lives, their sense of their place in the world with perfect and unwavering pitch." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Synopsis
From the author of "Hotel World"--shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize--comes an inventive and thought-provoking novel about a chance encounter that irrevocably changes a family's understanding of itself.

About the Author
Ali Smith is the author of six works of fiction, including the novel Hotel World, which was shortlisted for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize in 2001 and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award in 2002. Her story collections include Free Love, which won the Saltire Society Scottish First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, and The Whole Story and Other Stories. Born in Inverness, Scotland, in 1962, Smith now lives in Cambridge, England.
 

Genre/Form: Psychological fiction
Domestic fiction
Fiction
Material Type: Fiction
Document Type: Book
All Authors / Contributors: Ali Smith

ISBN: 0241141907 9780241141908 0241143462 9780241143469
OCLC Number: 137238065
Awards: Winner of Whitbread Book Awards: Novel Category 2005
Short-listed for Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award 2006
Short-listed for Orange Prize 2006
Short-listed for Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2005
Description: 305 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Responsibility: Ali Smith.