The Accidental

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Ali Smith is a Scottish author, born in Inverness in 1962. [5] She was a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow until she retired after contracting chronic fatigue syndrome, to concentrate on writing books. [6] Smith's first book, Free Love and Other Stories, was published in 1995 and praised by critics; it was awarded the Saltire First Book of the Year award. [5] Plot [ edit ]

The critic John Sutherland also comments on the novel's "remarkable narrative obliquity". [9] He notes also the intertextual and "intergeneric" nature of the book, the way in which it references the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1968 film Teorema in which, likewise, "a mysterious, beautiful stranger [...] arrives from nowhere into a family and, simply by virtue of what he is, destroys their merely 'theoretic' coherence". [9] Sutherland also stresses the ways in which Amber is "the offspring of cinema". [9] Reception [ edit ] verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{ Ratcliffe, Sophie (20 May 2005). "Life in sonnet form". The Times Literary Supplement . Retrieved 18 April 2008.

Turrentine, Jeff (26 February 2006). "When a Stranger Calls". The Washington Post . Retrieved 19 April 2008.When Patch runs up the gangway of steamship, RMS Glorious, she isn’t planning to hang around. But if she leaves her hiding place the constable might catch her: sitting tight is worth the risk. Too late, she realises the ship is setting sail! Patch has become an accidental stowaway. Strolling around the reservoir at Woodberry wetlands, we pass walkers and runners wearing blissful expressions. “One of the most exciting things the accidental countryside offers,” says Moss, “is making nature available to everyone.” A mother watches the water birds (there are five species of gull) while her toddler plays with stones on the pathway. And a lone walker bids us good morning – something strangers rarely do in London. In a country in which farms take up almost 57% of the land, the tiny, unmeasured fraction of accidental countryside we have needs protecting, says Moss, who made programmes with Bill Oddie for many years and has been a birder since boyhood. “Our society is geared to paying farmers very little money to produce huge amounts of food so supermarkets can make big profits and we have cheap food. Everyone’s happy except the farmers and the wildlife,” he says.

a b Schaub, Michael (8 January 2006). "Surprise visit upends a family's vacation". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 18 April 2008. He quotes the environmentalist Chris Baines who said that one way to improve the biodiversity of an arable field is to build a housing estate on it. “This may sound glib, but he was being entirely serious,” writes Moss in his new book, The Accidental Countryside. “Most arable fields are monocultural deserts, with virtually no wildlife, whereas Britain’s gardens are often home to a suite of former woodland birds and other wild creatures.” a b Caldwel, Gail (22 January 2006). "Perfect stranger". The Boston Globe . Retrieved 30 March 2008.

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Into this atomised family one day walks Amber, a thirtysomething blonde wastrel with no love of social niceties. She turns up on the doorstep claiming her car has broken down. Michael assumes she has come to interview Eve, while Eve assumes she is one of Michael's student mistresses; somehow Amber ends up staying with them in the rented cottage for several weeks. Everyone falls in love with Amber in a different way. But who is she, and what does she want? Reese, Jennifer (6 January 2006). "The Accidental (2006)". Entertainment Weekly . Retrieved 19 April 2008. 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. While building on “green” land seems sacrilege, he says we have an exaggerated notion of how built up Britain really is. According to the UK National Ecosystem Assessment, 7% of Britain is built on, rising to 10.6% in England alone. In 2012, the BBC reporter Mark Easton analysed this statistic and found that when you take into account urban gardens, parks and other green areas, the proportion of England that is built up drops to 2.3% (and lower nationally).