This was the Winner of the Whitbread Novel Award 2005 & shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize, so it should be good...

(blurb) Arresting & wonderful, 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 & sending each of the Smarts scurrying from the dark into light.


The book deals with how each member of the family reacts to a stranger in their midst & focuses a lot on what they are thinking- I found some of this writing style a bit hard going in parts & tended to skip bits!

I didn't enjoy it as much as I hoped I would but it was interesting to discover the effect that Amber had on each of their lives,& I did like the way that everything seemed to come a full circle in the end.

This now reserved for a "Prize Book" book box.

Going to someone as part of a Christmas Challenge.....

Ooooh! Santa Claus has visited my wish list... Thank you, Plum-crazy!

***
15 years later:

Ali Smith is a smart, playful and verbally gifted writer and brilliant storyteller (as I already knew). The idea of ​​this novel, the random guest Amber as a change agent for an ordinary family and its members, is good and witty. And the writer is as frisky as Amber! She throws into her text experimental narrative, a piece of poetry and - haha - for example, the history of cinema, which is not related to anything at all.
I see that the novel is good and unconvential enough to deserve its place on the 1001 list. But I too tended to skip now and then... Perhaps, for me, the novel still had not enough content for its form and length.

213/1001 done

-ruzena

30.10.2022: A wishlist RABCK.

Thank you for this surprise and a wishlist book! I have read Brick Lane which I considered a masterpiece. I am really happy to get this in English because it cannot be found in the library collection of my home county! (Only in Finnish.) I've badly wanted to read this in original language. So thank you, you've made my day.