Winner of Whitbread Book Awards: Novel Category 2006.

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

Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of Free Love, Like, Other Stories and Other Stories, Hotel World, The Whole Story and Other Stories, The Accidental, The First Person and Other Stories and There but for the. She lives in Cambridge.