The Accidental Favorite by Fran Littlewood: A Warm and Insightful Family Drama

When the Fisher sisters—Alex, Nancy, and Eva—gather at Eva’s sleek vacation home in the British countryside, a seemingly routine family photo turns explosive. Their father’s instinctive rush to save youngest sister Eva from a falling tree, captured on video by Eva’s teenage daughter, Lucy, goes viral and shatters the sisters’ belief that Mom and Dad don’t play favorites. Alex, the eldest, is juggling newborn exhaustion, a strained marriage, and a secret online obsession with an old flame. Nancy, the middle sister, balances a demanding radiology career with co-parenting struggles. And Eva, the youngest and wealthiest thanks to her bestselling board game, learns that money can’t buy emotional peace. In The Accidental Favorite, we see these three women navigate old wounds, shifting loyalties, and the public scrutiny of their father’s favoritism.

My Review

Reading The Accidental Favorite felt like catching up with my own sister and close girlfriends over tea—complete with laughter, tears, and that knowing look only sisters and close girlfriends share.

Fran Littlewood’s skillful shifts between past and present show just how deeply our childhood roles stick with us: I felt Alex’s fatigue and envy, Nancy’s frustration juggling work and custody, and Eva’s quiet guilt about privileges money brought her. The moment I realized that viral video would upend everything, my heart pounded—how often do we see flaws laid bare in front of the whole world?

Littlewood’s eye for detail makes every scene vivid: from sunlit mornings in that posh house to late-night confessions over half-empty wine glasses. Readers can expect an engaging mix of humor, sharp family insights, and moments that hit you right in the gut as the sisters question who they’ve been and who they want to be next.

This book will leave you feeling nostalgic and hopeful, convinced that even the messiest family moments can lead to deeper connection. It’s a heartfelt look at sisterhood, family dynamics, and the resilience that holds them together.

You can get a copy of The Accidental Favorite by Fran Littlewood on Amazon or Bookshop.

If this has you intrigued, read an excerpt from The Accidental Favorite by Fran Littlewood below.

The Accidental Favorite Excerpt Preview

Vivienne, Sunday morning

Sometimes she 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. They are aging, her children. Before her eyes, it seems. A kind of speeding up these past few years that makes her a little queasy. There’s an inadvertent whisper of distaste sometimes when she looks at them now. A distaste that shames her and that she can only assume comes from her own sense of panic. Because if her children—her babies—have lines around their eyes and mouths and if their hair is changing texture, turning gray at the parting and above the ears when the dye grows out, then where the hell does that leave her?

She moves nearer, not so close that they’ll see her—it’s rare she gets a chance to observe them like this, free from the demands of near-constant conversation and minor domestic dramas that char- acterize their family get-togethers. She’s thinking about the article she read a few years back in one of the Sunday supplements. The actual, physical paper that no one under the age of sixty-five seems to bother with these days. All of them too busy scrolling blank-eyed through their phones. The article about the four sisters, the White sisters, or maybe the Brown sisters. She isn’t sure which, a color anyhow. The sisters who were photographed lined up in the exact same order once a year, every year, for four decades. Forty years they kept it up. She’d been sat in the back of the kitchen, sunk deep into the wonky armchair, reading the feature. The sun through the windows had lit up the page, sanctifying the sisters, who stared with frank faces into the lens as they turned shot by shot from young women to old. Patrick was at the stove cooking eggs for breakfast, and she’d wanted to call out to him, to show him the prints, but there was a swelling in her throat and she found she couldn’t speak. She wanted to tell him how when the photographs were first shown in a gallery in Spain, visitors to the exhibition had stood and wept openly. Sitting there in the broken chair, looking and looking at the photographs, Vivienne had wanted to cry too. Loud, ugly tears. In the end, she’d given herself a headache from the not crying.

Excerpted from THE ACCIDENTAL FAVORITE: A Novel by Fran Littlewood. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2025 by Fran Littlewood. All rights reserved.

Ready for More?

If the Fisher sisters’ journey has you intrigued, grab your copy of The Accidental Favorite today on Amazon or Bookshop.

Once you’ve finished reading, come back and share your thoughts in the comments—I can’t wait to hear which Fisher sister you connected with the most!