Awards
2005 Whitbread Literary Awards Winner
2005 Booker Prize Nominee
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2006
Morning News Tournament of Books Winner |
Synopses & Reviews
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 mothers 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
Review
"Smith captures the speech and thoughts of each character with a real, compassionate kind of virtuosity." San Francisco Chronicle
Review
"[A] thoroughly charming and melodic novel." Boston Globe
Review
"Smith is a wizard at observing and memorializing the ebb and flow of the everyday mind." New York Times Book Review
Review
"The novel is alternately narrated by each member of the Smart family, but it is candid Astrid who steals the show, wandering through town with digital camera in hand." Booklist
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.