The Accidental
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3.5 • 15 Ratings
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE COSTA NOVEL OF THE YEAR
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE SALTIRE AWARD
'Joyous' The Times
The Accidental pans in on the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family one hot summer. There a beguiling stranger called Amber appears at the door bearing all sorts of unexpected gifts, trampling over family boundaries and sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into the light.
A novel about the ways that seemingly chance encounters irrevocably transform our understanding of ourselves, The Accidental explores the nature of truth, the role of fate and the power of storytelling.
*****
'Brilliant and engaging, frequently hilarious. . . Smith makes one look at the world afresh' Sunday Telegraph
'Funny, sexy, poignant, bewitching' Observer
'A beguiling page-turner . . . To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last' Independent
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
While the Smarts are a happy, prosperous British family on the surface, underneath they are as friable as a Balkan republic. Eve suffers from a block about writing yet another of her popular Genuine Article books (a series of imaginary reconstructions of obscure, actual figures from the past). Michael, her English professor husband, is a philanderer whose sexual predation on his students has reached critical mass. Teenaged Magnus, Eve's son by first husband Adam, is consumed by guilt around a particularly heinous school prank. And Astrid, Eve and Adam's daughter, is a 12-year- old channeling the angst of a girl three years older. Into this family drops one Amber MacDonald, a mysterious stranger who embeds herself in the family's summer rental in Norfolk and puts them all under her bullying spell. By some collective hallucination one into which Smith (Hotel World) utterly and completely draws the reader each Smart sees Amber as a savior, even as she violates their codes and instincts. So sure-handed are Smith's overlapping descriptions of the same events from different viewpoints that her simple, disquieting story lifts into brilliance. When Eve finally breaks the spell and kicks Amber out, it precipitates a series of long overdue jolts that destroys the family's fraught equilibrium, but the shock of Smith's facility remains.
