Fran Littlewood (Amazing Grace Adams) displays her deep understanding of complicated relationships in The Accidental Favorite, a novel that traces the Fisher family--Patrick, Vivienne, and their three adult daughters--backward from the shocking moment when Patrick accidentally reveals he might have a favorite child. Employing spot-on dialogue and strong pacing, Littlewood explores the nuanced nature of sibling rivalry and the ways people will sometimes hurt the ones they love the most.

From the outside, the Fishers remain a model of unity, but after a tree threatens to fall on the spot where his daughters--Alex, Nancy, and Eva--are standing for a photograph and Patrick rushes to save one over the others. After the incident, each member of this close-knit family must wrestle with their memories and the secrets that threaten to unravel them. Littlewood gradually teases out their story, bouncing between the past and the present, where the family has gathered at an expensive glass house in the English countryside to celebrate Vivienne's 70th birthday. The narrative is mostly passed among the sisters, allowing readers to see their family through each woman's perspective, reflecting the ways even shared memories and experiences can diverge. But the book opens with Vivienne, perhaps the only one who sees them truly, Vivienne who "can't believe these are her children. That these adult women, these women in their forties, have come from her. It seems a fantasy--a series of false memories--to imagine the long-ago stretched dome of her belly filled up with them. Those infants who clung to and hung from her body, who were surely entirely different people from the three women standing down there in the clearing." And Vivienne is right, even as she is simultaneously wrong: they are different people, and they are also very much still the children she remembers.

While the bonds between the siblings are undeniable, Littlewood renders each woman as a complex individual with her own desires, insecurities, and issues. In fact, the interweaving of their emotional truths is what gives this dramatic family story such depth. They are grappling with the idea that their father might have a favorite child, while they are also coping with being a woman in her 40s and all that entails. Eva must carry the guilt of her success, alongside her ambivalence concerning Scott (the man she recently, somewhat inexplicably, married) and her 16-year-old daughter Lucy's changing needs. Nancy is dealing with fears about her health, complications at work, and developing feelings for her colleague Nik. And Alex is facing the challenges of unexpectedly being a new mother again at 45 and the shifts she feels around desire and being desired. The sisters are all these things, and they are also the young children who shared a bedroom and vied for their parents' attention. And even as they question and challenge each other, they remain indelibly linked: "This, Eva thinks. This is the vernacular of sisters. It's childish and absurd and funny and infuriating and painful and it's beautiful. They are under her skin and in her heart, these women, her sisters, she has no choice in the matter. And despite everything, she'd rather be standing here right now than anywhere else."

Perhaps most relatable is Nancy, the middle sister, a doctor who doesn't feel like she fits, a woman who never feels like she's enough: "She tries so hard, but they make her feel like everything she does is wrong, that she is wrong, and why don't they see that it hurts so much. It hurts in her throat and in her chest, and in her too-busy mind that feels full to bursting with all the mistakes she can't stop making." This passage arrives in one of the flashback scenes, voiced from when Nancy is 11, but it is equally true of Nancy at 44. This feeling of inadequacy, of never being able to do enough, will resonate with readers, especially women who share Nancy's contrary mix of yearning for acceptance and fierce independence.

The novel has a cinematic quality, its scenes rendered in vividly recognizable detail: the flawless interiors of the vacation home, with its soaring glass walls, untouchable sculptures, and Scandinavian-inspired pool room ("It's all the wood and water and a mineral scent, as though the outdoors--the forest--has been brought inside"); the unpredictable weather; the odd appearances of the endangered toads that inhabit the surrounding forest. Every moment feels alive. In fact, the house itself almost feels like a living thing, a nefarious character with a mysterious, growing bad odor, and the way it seems to antagonize its guests. And while there are moments that may stretch the bounds of realism, every dramatic image contributes to the reader's understanding of and sympathy for these people and the very real mess they have found themselves in. Readers may think, "I would never do that," but they will not be able to deny the universal feelings unearthed in this fascinating look at one family and their complicated truths. Full of tender moments and thoughtful insights, The Accidental Favorite will be a favorite of readers, perfect for those with imperfect families--which is to say all of us. --Sara Beth West

Fran Littlewood (photo: Si Begg)

Following the success of her debut novel, Amazing Grace Adams, Fran Littlewood's The Accidental Favorite (Holt, June 24, 2025), explores parental favoritism and sibling rivalry that persists into adulthood. Littlewood holds an M.A. in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London, and lives with her husband and three daughters in north London.

There's a growing audience for stories about a woman's experience at midlife. What does The Accidental Favorite add to this conversation?

These women are in their 40s, asking: Are we the same person now as we were at 12 and 24 and 36? I'm interested in that whole investigation of selfhood and memory and how we change and evolve. It's a continuum, but how different are we at 45 from the person we were as a child? In the book, I'm looking at the childhood moments that are still having a great resonance on how the sisters are perceived and perceive themselves.

Despite being the impetus for all the turmoil in the story, Patrick's perspective is more veiled than the other characters. When we do finally understand what led to this moment of favoritism, we find it was always about him. It wasn't about some quality that the girls held that made one more favored than the other. But constant social comparison makes women feel like we have to earn it.

That's why I so wanted it to be the women who voice the book. So it's the three sisters, but we also get Vivienne's perspective as well. I thought a lot about the ways that the sisters equally judged one another's choices or behaviors yet accepted one another's choices and behavior and how that seems like a contradiction, but in a family that's how it works. And you don't need research to know that your siblings validate you and they invalidate you. They can be absolutely brutal. I think those hurts do stick with us for life, particularly with physical comments. And even if that doesn't come from your parents, it's all around you. In looking at sibling rivalry, research shows that it still exists in midlife. This isn't just a thing that you leave behind in childhood. It's set within your core that you're still battling whether or not you want to.

As a fellow middle child, Nancy is the character I identify with the most, especially the way she tries so hard and they keep telling her she's doing it wrong.

The Fisher family has an almost smug closeness, but there are the things they don't talk about, things they don't touch. This kind of communication void is quite a preoccupation of mine--the unsaid, the many things we don't say to each other. The research I did involves lots about family codes, family laws, family scripts, and the ways some children fit into the code. And then there are the siblings who don't fit, like Nancy. She goes against the family law because she's the truth teller. She wants to talk about the difficult things.

Nancy, she's still the screw-up within her family, even though she's a doctor, and Eva, the youngest, feels she still isn't heard even though she's an entrepreneur who's made millions. And then Alex, the eldest, is the keeper of that family flame, the one most likely to share her parents' worldview. But even as I boiled them down to the boxes they've been put in, what I really wanted to say is that, they're all the screw-ups. We're all the screw ups, you know, we're all complex and contradictory.

The novel shows how women will compare themselves to one another, especially regarding physical appearance. Why can't we stop comparing ourselves even when we know there's no good there?

I mean, that's the womanhood issue, isn't it? It's this culture where beauty is prized above everything. That's the winning card as a woman. You see that in the book with Eva being "the beautiful one." It's impossible to escape that societal trap. Growing up, I felt compared with my sisters--not by my parents, but certainly implicitly by family friends--you know, the clever one, the beautiful one. And it's the same awful social comparison that I was seeing with my three daughters online, on Instagram, on all of these things that are lining these young women up together and comparing them.

I wanted to draw a line between those two things, that being compared as a sibling and being compared online, particularly for young women. I so enjoyed writing into those difficult spaces, the ugly truths, the things that feel universal, but how often do we admit that? It's awful, that programming, where you're constantly being assessed so you're assessing, and it's all so unimportant.

The glass house is such an interesting device--both setting and metaphor. What did it mean for you?

When I was writing about the Dartmouth Park house, the house they grew up in, I started to think about homes as being repositories for our memories. And the Dartmouth Park house, of course, is a bit shabby, but it's got their past lives etched into the fabric of it, literally, but also in a more philosophical sense. And then the glass house, which, of course, Eva has paid for, is a glossy, beautiful, perfect house, but the bad smell starts to seep in. It's the same with any curated online image, where everything is not as it seems. The glass house is not as it seems. And in fact, the Dartmouth Park house is shabbier, but it is the place that they come back to. When Alex is driving in the rain and she says she wants to go home, she doesn't mean the home that she shares in South London with her husband. She means her childhood home.

Yes, I loved the centering that the home gives--both to the sisters and to the narrative. When you return to the past, it sinks us into that family history and grounds us.

It's such a rooted part of who you are, those houses we grew up in. And of course, those are the memories that we share with our siblings. Even if we experienced them in different ways, we do share those memories. When they bought the house, it was in four flats, and they dismantled this house and then put it back together. And in doing that, they were building their relationship, their marriage, their family, and over the course of the narrative, that obviously starts to fall apart. Then we get to the end, and we're looking at new beginnings and a new start. The family has been pulled apart over the course of this narrative, and we're standing at the edge of them starting to rebuild. --Sara Beth West