The Accidental

Winner of the Whitbread Award for best novel and praised for her "style, ideas, and punch" (Jeanette Winterson), Smith has produced a novel at once profound, playful, and exhilaratingly inventive, as she transfixes readers with a portrait of a family unraveled by a mysterious visitor.

"The Accidental" is the dizzyingly entertaining, wickedly humorous story of a mysterious stranger whose sudden appearance during a family's summer holiday transforms four variously unhappy people. Each of the Smarts-parents Eve and Michael, son Magnus, and the youngest, daughter Astrid-encounter Amber in his or her own solipsistic way, but somehow her presence allows them to se their lives (and their life together) in a new light. Smith's exhilarating facility with language, her narrative freedom, and her chromatic wordplay propel the novel to its startling, wonderfully enigmatic conclusion.
Ali Smith's acclaimed novel won the prestigious Whitbread Award and was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize, the Orange Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.