'My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the cafe of the town's only cinema . . .'
One hot summer a stranger arrives at the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family. Intriguing, beguiling, arresting, Amber brings love, joy, pain and not a little upheaval, throwing the carefully ordered world of the Smarts into the air. They will be forever changed by Amber but how will they know whether it is for the bad, the good or something else entirely?
'Joyous ... writing as rapture, as giddy delight' The Times
'Funny, sexy, poignant, bewitching' Observer
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public library and other stories, How to be both, Shire, Artful, There but for the, The first person and other stories, Girl Meets Boy, The Accidental, The whole story and other stories, Hotel World, Other stories and other stories, Like and Free Love. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Bailey's Prize, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Autumn was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and Winter was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize 2018. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.
Title: The Accidental (Penguin Essentials)
Author: Smith, Ali
ISBN: 9780241989111
Binding:
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Publication Date: 2020-07-23
Number of Pages: 320
Weight: 0.1801 kg
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 *
