Accident
Danielle Steel, 1994
★ 4.04 from 17.1k ratings on Goodreads
A perfect California family, a sunny Saturday, and the ordinary choices that leave one mother wondering what she gave up. A warm domestic surface with dread underneath, moving at a steady, tender pace.
Feels like tenderness, hope and dread. About war, memory and family.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy family dramas about marriage, motherhood, and ordinary choices that carry heavy consequences. Be aware that some readers find the story repetitive and predictable, with a rushed romance and an abrupt ending.
Why read it
It offers a close look at the pull between family duty and personal longing, and at what a mother quietly sacrifices.
A page from the book
The life you wanted and the life you chose, in one car ride.
For a moment, there was an old familiar pang of longing. Maybe it was just the warm, sunny day, or the fact that it was spring, but she suddenly wished that there would be other babies . . . romantic trips . . . more time with Brad . . . lazy afternoons in bed, with nowhere to go, and nothing to do except make love to him. As much as she loved her life, there were times when she wished she could turn the clock back. Nowadays, her life was so full of car pools, and helping with homework, and PTA, she and Brad only seemed to catch each other on the fly, or at the end of an exhausting day. What readers say
Many readers were deeply moved and cried over the family crisis, praising the mother’s courage and emotional pull. Others found the story repetitive, predictable, and the ending abrupt, and some were frustrated by characters and a rushed romance.
Danielle Steel.Danielle Steel has nine children and more than 190 books to her name; she is one of the world's best-selling living novelists.
Books that feel like this
More by Danielle Steel
Daddy
Danielle Steel, 1989
A woman who once wanted to write gives her life to a marriage and children in the New York suburbs — and finds the bill coming due.
Fine Things
Danielle Steel, 1987
A man who builds a life of order and elegance discovers how quickly love can rearrange everything, in a story that moves from New York's fashion world to the beaches of Mexico.
Zoya
Danielle Steel, 1988
From imperial ballrooms to exile, a Russian aristocrat learns what survival costs.
Where to get it
Some of these links earn us a small commission, at no cost to you. It keeps BookFeed free.
Questions readers ask
- Is Accident for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy family dramas about marriage, motherhood, and ordinary choices that carry heavy consequences. Be aware that some readers find the story repetitive and predictable, with a rushed romance and an abrupt ending.
- What is Accident like?
- A warm domestic surface with dread underneath, moving at a steady, tender pace. Feels like tenderness, hope and dread. About war, memory and family.
- What should I read after Accident?
- If you liked Accident, try For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway), The Women (Kristin Hannah) and She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb).
A taste of the feed
The inventory a man takes once dying has stopped frightening him.
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.
For Whom the Bell Tolls · Ernest Hemingway
The war between a father's absence and a mother's silence, told by a child.
I wanted my father to be at home laughing with Ma on Saturday afternoons, instead of with Mrs. Masicotte, who had yellowy white hair and a fat little body like Zahra’s. My father called Mrs. Masicotte by her first name, LuAnn; Ma called her, simply, “her.” “It’s her,” she’d tell Daddy whenever the telephone interrupted our dinner.
She’s Come Undone · Wally Lamb
How long it takes before cruelty becomes ordinary.
It wasn’t easy tolerating him talking this way to her, to bear his scorn, his ridicule, his insults, his walking past her like she was nothing but a house cat. But after four years of marriage, Mariam saw clearly how much a woman could tolerate when she was afraid. And Mariam was afraid.
A Thousand Splendid Suns · Khaled Hosseini
Read pages from books like this, one at a time
Keep reading in the feed