Amber is the central catalyst of the book (little portions between each section are devoted to her voice, or what is assumed to be her voice), the one trigger that sends the story and characters into strange spirals, while their mundane domestic dramas continue undisturbed. She steps into the novel as an unrestrained, truly free individual and compromises the stifling repression rippling at the heart of this typical family.

Astrid's mother, Eve, is supposed to be writing the next in her series of "Genuine Articles", books that relate the lives of people who died in the second world war, but then carry on as though they had lived - which enables Smith to make some nice jokes at the expense of the biography industry. Eve's husband, Michael, is a philandering university teacher of literature; her son Magnus, the least convincingly drawn person, thinks in mathematical terms and has done something terrible at school. Set in 2003, the novel consists of three parts: "The Beginning," "Middle" and "The End". Each part contains four separate narrations, one focusing on each member of the Smart family: Eve, the mother, Michael, her husband, Astrid (12) and Magnus (17), two children of Eve's from a previous marriage (to Adam Berenski). Opening and closing the novel, and between each part, we have four sections of first-person narration from 'Alhambra' – who we can assume is Amber, the Smarts' uninvited house-guest. Not all of the changes are good. Indeed, Amber certainly does things that help the family but others are positively harmful. In some cases, we are left wondering whether good will come out of the changes or whether the individual is set on a course that may or may not be positive. Ali Smith is too good a writer to make simplistic judgements, even if we might do so. Smith's work has been the subject of critical acclaim from the publication of her first Saltire award-winning collection of stories, Free Love and Other Stories, in 1995. She has since been shortlisted for the Booker and the Orange prizes for both her second novel, Hotel World, and her third, The Accidental, for which she received the 2005 Whitbread novel award. Her fondness for the grandscale and her employment of shifting perspectives, formal risk-taking and rich language all mark Smith out as a "literary" writer, but her confident, inventive tales also display a humour which lightens the ambitious themes she covers. Her penchant for wordplay and the pleasure she takes in the outlandish and idiosyncratic have, however, given rise to the criticism that she can on occasion stray a little too far into the arch. Recommended worksWhat does The Accidental say about family life? In what ways are the Smarts both a typical and an atypical family? Eva has achieved some success with a series of books called the Genuine Article Series -- "autobiotruefictinterviews", written in question-and-answer form. The Accidental takes a well-worn premise – in which the appearance of an enigmatic newcomer upsets the balance of a largely dissatisfied upper-middle-class family – and filters it through that inimitable freeform Ali Smith style. After graduating from Aberdeen University, Smith went to Cambridge to study for her doctorate. Other jobs Funny, sexy, poignant, surprising, playful . . . Although the novel dazzles with the richness of language and ideas, it retains a delicious lightness." – The Observer.

Spectacular . . . Allusive, ambitious and formally acrobatic . . . Original, restless, formally and morally challenging, [Ali Smith] remains a writer who resists definition." - The Times Literary Supplement. I read this book partly due my love of Ali Smith (based largely around her Seasonal Quartet) but also due to its setting in Norfolk (for interest the culmination of the Seasonal Quartet is also set in Norfolk – Smith herself living nearby in Cambridge, my University town, which also features in this novel). I feel like there was an age, or it IS that age, where writers love to explore with much keenness the family unit, for it is the perfect structure with which to scrutinize its individual parts ("The Corrections," "White Teeth," "The Red House," the list is almost infinite). & this one, a more accessible and modern "Sound and Fury" is a doozy. Like, what is happening here? is the main question through this dense but very readable firework of a novel. All 4, or five, protagonists are given a very democratic framework in which to display their various personalities. We trace their singular trajectories, their personalities bleed unto each vignette like a soul to some artifact--authentic life stories, these. What effects does Smith create by telling the story through each family member’s point of view? How would the novel have been different if told through a single omniscient narrator?But I did get a little confused at some points. The whole book is about story telling and it gets quite metaphorical at times. But as a whole it is quite an interesting read with many layers to it. A flat-out triumph of structure, style, shifting narrative voices, rhythm and language. A pitch-perfect technical masterpiece. Split into three components—the beginning, the middle and the end—the story moves between four perspectives: daughter, son, father, mother. Each section describes various events around a holiday trip to Norwich and the arrival of Amber, a charismatic drifter who changes her behaviour to accommodate each person. The other approach is to believe that it all actually happened, that despite melding truth & fiction for a living; Eve Smart couldn't see through the totally made up surface of Amber/Alhambra's persona & that in the end, Amber used another pseudonym, this time around, she called herself Eve & that the American family was in for a Smart-like misadventure— they were gonna lose all the doorknobs, carpets, & all their pretty horses too!