By the end, everything, including the story of the stranger on the doorstep, is ready to begin again. Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published. 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).

The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Amber, the charismatic, unpredictable, and mysterious visitor, insinuates herself into the household while they are on holiday and changes all their perceptions and lives.It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment…. arrives from nowhere into a family and, simply by virtue of what he is, destroys their merely 'theoretic' coherence". And much of the comedy and the fundamental cheerfulness in Smith’s work has to do, I think, with the figurative consolations the pun embodies: that life is generative, and that, even as things split apart, they can be brought together. In the same book, a character named Art is the one who sees, at the dining table, a chunk of landscape, just hanging above him, as if “someone had cut a slice out of the coast and dipped it into the room with us, like we’re the coffee and it’s the biscotti.

The awkwardness of the novel's moralizing is all the more disconcerting given its fine, lustrous texture on the page.Laurie’s hasty decision not to tell Sarah is the second painful missed opportunity (after not getting off the bus), but Sarah’s happiness is so important to Laurie that she dedicates ample energy into retraining her heart not to love Jack.