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The Accidental
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  • Published: 27 November 2020
  • ISBN: 9780241989111
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 320
  • RRP: $29.99

The Accidental

Formats & editions
EBook
7 Nov 2013
Audiobook
11 Feb 2021
Paperback
27 Nov 2020
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: $29.99
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About the author

Ali Smith

Ali Smith's works of fiction include the novel Hotel World, which was short-listed for both the Orange Prize and the Booker Prize and won the Encore Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award, and The Accidental, which won the Whitbread Award and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Her story collections include Free Love, which won a Saltire Society First Book of the Year Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award, The Whole Story and Other Stories, and How to be Both, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2015. Born in Inverness, Scotland, Smith lives in Cambridge, England.
AS

Also by Ali Smith

Glyph
Gliff
Let Your Light Shine
Companion piece
Like
Free Love
Summer
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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