The award-winning novel by Booker-shortlistee Ali Smith, now a Penguin Essential.

'My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town's only cinema . . .'

One hot summer a stranger arrives at the Norfolk holiday home of the Smart family. Intriguing, beguiling, arresting, Amber brings love, joy, pain and not a little upheaval, throwing the carefully ordered world of the Smarts into the air. They will be forever changed by Amber but how will they know whether it is for the bad, the good or something else entirely?

'Joyous ... writing as rapture, as giddy delight' The Times

'Funny, sexy, poignant, bewitching' Observer

"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

"A beguiling page-turner ... a brilliant creation. To read The Accidental is to be excited from first to last" - Independent

"Smith's novels fizz with pyrotechnic prose, whirl-wind openings, bewitching invention" - Observer

"Exuberantly inventive ... at once dazzlingly bright and profoundly dark" - Sunday Times