Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4494 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-06
• Released on: 2006-04-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
Dazzling wordplay and abundant imagination invigorate a tale of lives interrupted. Highly touted Brit Smith (Hotel World, 2002, etc.) is an original whose choppy perspectives and internal riffs take some getting used to. This third novel, her second to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, reveals its hand slowly as it switches among Alhambra, a recurrent character, and the separate trajectories of the Smart family, on holiday in Norfolk. Astrid, 12 and bored, sees life at one remove through the viewfinder of her camera; her brother Magnus, implicated in a bullying that led to a school mate's death, is borderline suicidal; their mother, Eve, a writer, is blocked; and their stepfather, Michael, an academic, is a compulsive philanderer. Each of these lives is thrown onto a different track by the arrival of mysterious, mercurial Amber, who is probably not telling the truth when she says she became a vagrant after killing a child in a car accident. Amber is lovely, fierce and unpredictable. She throws Astrid's camera away and seduces Magnus. Indifferent towards Michael's physical charms, she reveals to him the waning of his sexual allure. After Amber kisses Eve, she is thrown out of the house, and takes her revenge by stripping the Smarts' London home of everything, including faucets and doorknobs. But even bigger things are ahead. Inventive, intelligent, playful, Smith has a pin-sharp ear for her characters' voices. Underneath the glittering surface lies a darker debate about truth and consequences, as well as a magnificent history of the cinema. It's not so much about the story as it is about the virtuosity of the telling. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
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.

About the Author
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 and lives in Cambridge. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World and The Whole Story and Other Stories.

Customer Reviews

Oh dear
Having read a few excellent reviews of this book on Amazon I decided to give it a try. Only when I reached the last page did I realise that it's by the same author as Hotel World. If I had realised that I would never have tried this book at all.

It's true that some of the prose is passably good - but that's as far as it goes. There is a lot of rhetorical discussion about cliches. However,that's exactly what the characters are in this story. There isn't an ounce of credible characterisation of any of the main characters. They are all totally two-dimensional characters - the philandering lecturer; Bisto Mum in a mid-life crisis; Adrian Mole with a guilty conscience etc.

I'm personally amazed that this book has been so highly praised not just on Amazon, but in general.

tedious
Oh dear, I loved the idea of this book, it promised a thought provoking, interesting read and it turned out to be the opposite. It tries to be clever with an immediate but bizarre narrative which doesn't allow the characters to flesh out. Their thoughts just spill out haphazardly across the page and frequently lead the reader nowhere. It's like a butterfly flitting from one thought to the next and although I'm well aware that many of us have minds that work just that way it proves tedious to read someone else's. If I could write down every thought I had during the day would anyone want to read it? If the answer is yes then you may enjoy this book but I suspect the vast majority would answer no and this majority should steer clear.

modernist nightmare for the reader
This book, set in the early years of the 21st century, is based on the plot of a mysterious stranger disturbing the already fragmented equilibrium of a family. Although evocatively written, it is fundamentally pointless. Neither interesting nor enjoyable, and I struggled to finish reading it, the apparent attraction seems to be the apparent conflict between reality and imagination, the collisions of personal realities and other modernist ghosts which I thought had disappeared in the '70s.

Oh, and returning to the early 21st century: why do Britain's current literary leading lights insist on banging on about the second Iraqi war, even when they have little of interest to say about it? Similarly, why do they ignore the stewing of the planet in industrially produced juices? Maybe it's all too real.