The Smart family, on holiday in a rented house in Norfolk, is thrown into disarray when a stranger named Amber walks in and is taken for a colleague by each of them. The novel moves between the voices of the mother, stepfather, teenage son and young daughter, and of Amber herself.
Books mentioned in The Accidental (9)
Emma by Jane Austen: “"The whole history dwindled soon into a matter of little importance but to Emma and her nephews..." Jane Austen (epigraph)”
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens: “from the classics shelf: "Great Expectations. My infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit."”
The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot: “The Mill on the Floss. Volume One, Book First, Boy and Girl.”
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray: “Vanity Fair. A novel without a hero. The Manager of the Performance.”
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway: “didst thou feel the earth move ... in the not-very-good For Whom the Bell Tolls, 1941 Michael believed”
Journey by Moonlight by Antal Szerb: “picked a book off the shelf ... Journey by Moonlight. Antal Szerb. Never heard of him. Translated from the Hungarian.”
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott: “She opened a book and pretended to read. Little Women, Eve said. Which are you, then? Married, tomboy, vain or dead?”
An Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin: “Larkin ... knew the power of cliché. What will survive of us is love.”
At Grass by Philip Larkin: “His old racehorses in that horse poem didn't 'gallop for joy' but for what must be joy.”