Review
One of The Guardian’s “Best books of autumn”
“An ingenious speculative novel. . . . Smith makes the most of her protagonists’ youthful perspectives to bring a sense of wonder, inquisitiveness, and pathos to the story. . . . The lush narrative doubles as an anthem of resistance, in this case against tyranny and the destruction of the environment. Inspired references to Charles Dickens and Virginia Woolf add to Smith’s literary tapestry. The results are extraordinary.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This idea of freedom—the possibility of moving through the world unconfined by a single, determinate category, able to swap identities or shed them altogether—is both Smith’s great theme and a description of her methods. Her books are restless, shape-changing, multifarious enterprises, scrambling conventional definitions of genre.... Smith’s prose, as ever, is the principal enchantment: profane, playful, perpetually alert to the pleasures and serendipity of words, a spark she bestows on Briar and Rose…. She renders an awakening consciousness and the terrible reality in which it is embedded with faultless grace and dexterity.”
—New York Times
“[Gliff] follows two children as they navigate a heavily surveilled dystopian world in which tech is omnipresent, and oppressive…. [Smith’s] speech has a fable-like quality, as if she were constantly locating herself within a narrative…. Her prose skips lightly across the page, no matter how dark the subject matter…. Part of the joy of Gliff is that, while it is a dystopia, there are moments of genuine humor.
—The New Yorker
“But that mood [of angst] is frequently lightened by the author’s gift for conveying a fizzily fresh and vibrant young person’s mind. . . . A dark vision brightened by the engaging craft of an inventive writer.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“As usual with Smith, the gorgeous prose will swirl in your head. Gliff is challenging and enigmatic—and a novel that possibly needs more than one reading to fully appreciate.”
—The Independent
“Ali Smith excels at the creation of a lost, curious, intelligent mind adrift in a world of surprises and the unforeseen. . . . She has a glorious line in encounters and incidents, observed strangeness and facts too large to be ignored, too inevitable to be made sense of. . . . Smith is a vivid, alluringly chatty novelist capable of deft and unforeseeable sidesteps. The second book of the pair, set for release next year, will be worth it.”
—The Telegraph
“After the breakneck, up-to-the-minute nature of the seasonal quartet and its epilogue, Gliff aims are something more fabulist and timeless…Gliff is like a fanfare of the Ali Smith showcase. There are redactions, puns, quick-fire exchanges, malapropisms, neologisms and more. It is replete with cadenzas and the studied impromptu…Gliff, of course, is entertaining and sophisticated and clever.”
—The Scotsman
“[Ali Smith] projects her exceptional state-of-the-nation storytelling on to a dystopian tale of a brutal Britain run by totalitarian forces. . . . [H]opeful. . . . [I]f Smith’s recent books were a handbook for 21st-century life, Gliff is a warning as to what will happen if we ignore their lessons.”
—The Guardian
“Gliff offers a chilling window into its endgame: a world where surveillance, data collection, algorithmic tools, and environmental collapse have created an Orwellian hellscape. Through Smith’s elliptical prose, we slowly piece together the realities of this dystopian Albion, as two “unverifiable” siblings are left to fend for themselves after their activist mother and her partner are disappeared…. It’s a vivid portrait of a decaying civilization—one snuffed out not with a bang but with a bleak, bureaucratic whimper.”
—Vogue
About the Author
ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Companion Piece, the "Seasonal Quartet," Public library and other stories, and How to be both, which won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Her work has four times been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Most recently, she won the George Orwell Prize for Fiction for Summer. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.
