The Accidental
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  • Published: 27 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241989111
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.00

The Accidental

Formats & editions
Paperback
27 Nov 2020
EBook
7 Nov 2013
Audiobook
11 Feb 2021
Paperback
1 May 2006
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The award-winning novel by Booker-shortlistee Ali Smith, now a Penguin Essential

The 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.
  • Published: 27 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241989111
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $24.00
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About the author

Ali Smith

Ali Smith is the author of Free Love and Other Stories, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, Girl Meets Boy, The First Person and Other Stories, There but for the, Artful, How to be both, Public library and other stories and Autumn. Hotel World was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Orange Prize and The Accidental was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Orange Prize. How to be both won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and the Costa Novel Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker and the Folio Prize. Ali Smith lives in Cambridge.

Also by Ali Smith

How to be Both
Summer
There but for the
Spring
Companion piece
Autumn
Winter
See all

Praise for The Accidental

A beguiling page-turner ... a brilliant creation. To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last

Independent

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

Smith's novels fizz with pyrotechnic prose, whirl-wind openings, bewitching invention

Observer

Exuberantly inventive ... at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark

Sunday Times