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Gliff
Win a free print copy of this book!
13 days and 15:49:22
25 copies available
U.S. only
O brave new world, that has such people in't.
Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.
What does it mean?
It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world.
What would that actually be like?
In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?
And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?
Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.
Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.
What does it mean?
It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world.
What would that actually be like?
In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?
And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?
Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.
- GenresFiction
240 pages, Paperback
Expected publication October 31, 2024
About the author
Ali Smith
150 books4,771 followersAli Smith is a writer, born in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. She has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 17 years and dedicates all her books to her.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 23, 2024
Profound thank you thank you thank you to Netgalley and Knopf/Pantheon for the ARC!
A new Ali Smith is always cause for celebration - and much like her compatriots Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk, I always find her works challenging, intellectually dense, and often enigmatic (sometimes even inscrutably incomprehensible) - but in the BEST of all possible ways. Such an immense pleasure to immerse oneself in her gorgeous, playful, elliptical prose and imaginative storytelling. So it is with this latest tome, her first since her magnificent Seasonal Quartet + Companion Piece.
This, the first in a duology, leaves many questions unanswered, that may or may not become clearer when the other volume (Glyph) comes out a year from now- but this gives one more than enough to contemplate till that happens. After finishing it, I immediately went back to the beginning and began reading it again - yes, it's THAT kind of book.
To be utterly reductive, it's a dystopian novel, set in the very near future, and is for the most part (till the very end) narrated by a woman named Briar (aka Bri and Brice), looking back from some years down the road (and an even more formidable future), to a time when she was thirteen and she and her sister Rose became separated from their mother, due to some sinister shenanigans of the current totalitarian political regime.
They are left to fend for themselves for the most part, and it is when Rose becomes enamored of a horse scheduled for the abattoir, whom she names Gliff, that their bleak existence finds focus and purpose. For fear of spoilers, I will leave things there - but cannot wait to continue the story as soon as part two becomes available.
I have heard that Smith, after being shortlisted for the Booker four times without winning, instructs her publisher to no longer submit her work - which is a shame as this would certainly make the 2025 longlist ... at the very least.
A new Ali Smith is always cause for celebration - and much like her compatriots Deborah Levy and Rachel Cusk, I always find her works challenging, intellectually dense, and often enigmatic (sometimes even inscrutably incomprehensible) - but in the BEST of all possible ways. Such an immense pleasure to immerse oneself in her gorgeous, playful, elliptical prose and imaginative storytelling. So it is with this latest tome, her first since her magnificent Seasonal Quartet + Companion Piece.
This, the first in a duology, leaves many questions unanswered, that may or may not become clearer when the other volume (Glyph) comes out a year from now- but this gives one more than enough to contemplate till that happens. After finishing it, I immediately went back to the beginning and began reading it again - yes, it's THAT kind of book.
To be utterly reductive, it's a dystopian novel, set in the very near future, and is for the most part (till the very end) narrated by a woman named Briar (aka Bri and Brice), looking back from some years down the road (and an even more formidable future), to a time when she was thirteen and she and her sister Rose became separated from their mother, due to some sinister shenanigans of the current totalitarian political regime.
They are left to fend for themselves for the most part, and it is when Rose becomes enamored of a horse scheduled for the abattoir, whom she names Gliff, that their bleak existence finds focus and purpose. For fear of spoilers, I will leave things there - but cannot wait to continue the story as soon as part two becomes available.
I have heard that Smith, after being shortlisted for the Booker four times without winning, instructs her publisher to no longer submit her work - which is a shame as this would certainly make the 2025 longlist ... at the very least.
Want to read
January 13, 2024a new duology, two books with the same name — Gliff and Glyph.
bless you, Ali Smith.
bless you, Ali Smith.
June 16, 2024
Brilliant and gutting. I cannot wait for the next book.
August 16, 2024
how do i even begin to review this?
honestly, of all the words in a dictionary, in the worlds, all the languages
i’m struggling
but it gave me a sense of
how do i say
openness?
belonging? maybe not?
this was a world the future could be
it’s gutting to imagine but we’re partially one foot in that doorway
but we can change that, can’t we?
as i read more i started to understand more, felt my mind splitting apart into different understandings
of who we are, who we aren’t, who others are, or aren’t.
we truly can be. anyone we want to be.
+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*
They’re nothing to do with us or here. And even if they were. We’re here now. She’d say something like they’re not even real children. They’re AI. They never existed. Or obvs you loser it’s a picture of people who were chosen because they look right, they’re people who didn’t even know each other having their picture taken by some photographer who didn’t know them either and then the photographer sold it to a conlomerate. She always missed out the g in conglomerate. I said she did this because she didn’t know how to say it, she said it was because she was taking some of a conlomerate’s power away from it by mis-saying it. And then machines made a lot of copies of the same photo and inserted them into a lot of keyrings so that these keyrings would sell to people who saw them wherever, in shops or online, by giving people the idea that they could put their own kids’ photo in there. It was quite usual and acceptable now for photos that purported to be true pictures of reality not to be what they were or appeared to be.
I can’t believe you’re saying no when we can do what we like, there is nobody here to stop us and it’s what I want and choose to eat, my sister said. Her happiness had started to annoy me. So I said, I can’t believe you’re being so profligate already. Being so what? she said. Profligate, I said. You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said.
She looked up at me. She looked very small and bright beneath me, her forehead sunlit. Sometimes I think you’re a very old and wise person disguised as you, I said. Thanks, she said. And sometimes, I said, I think you’re one of the youngest greenest people I’ll ever know. I am all my me’s, she said. I am complete.
If anyone threatens you again like that you have to tell me. And I’ll kill them, I said.
Nah, she said. You won’t. That’s the kind of thing you think you’re supposed to say. And Posho was saying the kind of thing he thought he was supposed to say too. Loads of them say that stuff about girls, the ones that are most threatened by girls do. Some of the boys and men think it makes them more superior to say that stuff. They hate to think something outside them can see them and maybe judge them. It’s not just men or boys, a lot of people are threatened by knowing that people who they think aren’t anything like them exist. Yeah, though some of them do actually want to do that stuff to the people they threaten, and some of them do actually do it. Anyway if anyone did it to me, I’m telling you. I’d kill them myself.
Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?
honestly, of all the words in a dictionary, in the worlds, all the languages
i’m struggling
but it gave me a sense of
how do i say
openness?
belonging? maybe not?
this was a world the future could be
it’s gutting to imagine but we’re partially one foot in that doorway
but we can change that, can’t we?
as i read more i started to understand more, felt my mind splitting apart into different understandings
of who we are, who we aren’t, who others are, or aren’t.
we truly can be. anyone we want to be.
+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*+*
They’re nothing to do with us or here. And even if they were. We’re here now. She’d say something like they’re not even real children. They’re AI. They never existed. Or obvs you loser it’s a picture of people who were chosen because they look right, they’re people who didn’t even know each other having their picture taken by some photographer who didn’t know them either and then the photographer sold it to a conlomerate. She always missed out the g in conglomerate. I said she did this because she didn’t know how to say it, she said it was because she was taking some of a conlomerate’s power away from it by mis-saying it. And then machines made a lot of copies of the same photo and inserted them into a lot of keyrings so that these keyrings would sell to people who saw them wherever, in shops or online, by giving people the idea that they could put their own kids’ photo in there. It was quite usual and acceptable now for photos that purported to be true pictures of reality not to be what they were or appeared to be.
I can’t believe you’re saying no when we can do what we like, there is nobody here to stop us and it’s what I want and choose to eat, my sister said. Her happiness had started to annoy me. So I said, I can’t believe you’re being so profligate already. Being so what? she said. Profligate, I said. You are bullying me with words longer than the length of my life, she said.
She looked up at me. She looked very small and bright beneath me, her forehead sunlit. Sometimes I think you’re a very old and wise person disguised as you, I said. Thanks, she said. And sometimes, I said, I think you’re one of the youngest greenest people I’ll ever know. I am all my me’s, she said. I am complete.
If anyone threatens you again like that you have to tell me. And I’ll kill them, I said.
Nah, she said. You won’t. That’s the kind of thing you think you’re supposed to say. And Posho was saying the kind of thing he thought he was supposed to say too. Loads of them say that stuff about girls, the ones that are most threatened by girls do. Some of the boys and men think it makes them more superior to say that stuff. They hate to think something outside them can see them and maybe judge them. It’s not just men or boys, a lot of people are threatened by knowing that people who they think aren’t anything like them exist. Yeah, though some of them do actually want to do that stuff to the people they threaten, and some of them do actually do it. Anyway if anyone did it to me, I’m telling you. I’d kill them myself.
Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?
Want to read
July 23, 2024"From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when Western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our complexities, matter more than ever."
not a huge fan of either cover tbh
not a huge fan of either cover tbh
Currently reading
August 29, 2024A NEW ALI SMITH BOOK !!!!!!!!!! I need the arc now
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews