The Accidental
Synopsis
The Smart family is spending the summer in Norfolk. Eve is holed up in the shed, pretending to write her latest book. Her teenage daughter Astrid is trying to come to terms with the ‘substandard’ nature of the holiday home by taking copious documentary footage. Astrid’s brother Magnus, previously form captain and model pupil, is in an intractable depression. And their stepfather Michael Smart keeps popping back to the university in London to check on progress with his current special pupil.
Amber just arrived one day. Eve assumed she was Michael’s student, Michael thought she was a friend of Eve’s. Magnus thought she was an angel, sent to save him. Astrid thought that if Amber were a cartoon character, she would have been a superheroine, but also that she is definitely insane. The whole family is bewitched. And then Amber just didn’t leave…
Author Biography
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in August 1962. She won the Saltire First Book Award and a Scottish Arts Council Award in 1995 for her first collection of stories, Free Love. Her first novel, Like, was published in 1997 and her second collection of stories, Other Stories and Other Stories, in 1999. Hotel World, her second novel, was shortlisted for the 2001 Booker Prize for Fiction and Orange Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel, The Accidental, was shortlisted for The Man Booker Prize in 2005. She lives in Cambridge.
