Excerpt from Gliff by Ali Smith, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

We couldn't spot her, there were so many people, the inside restaurant full, the outside front courtyard restaurant full too, of people the like of which I had never seen, not in real life. They were so beautiful, coiffed and perfect, the people eating in the restaurant of the place our mother was working. They were smoothed as if airbrushed, as if you really could digitally alter real people.

I saw a table with what looked like a family at it, a woman, the mother presumably, elegant, raising her fork, it had a piece of something on it and she put it to her mouth rather than in her mouth, as if she were automatonic, then her arm and hand put it back down on the plate, then raised it again. Next to her, a boy, elegant, stirring indifferently at what was on his plate and staring into space. Then the man, the father maybe, rotund but elegant, dressed as if at an awards ceremony off TV and scrolling a phone instead of eating. Then a girl, I couldn't see what she was doing but she was elegant even though she had her back to me.

It was like they all had their backs to me, even the ones facing me.

Their disconnect was what elegant meant.

Like something vital had been withdrawn from them, for its own protection maybe? maybe surgically, the withdrawal of the too-much-life from people who could afford it by people masked and smelling of cleanness inserting the cannula in a clinic, its reassuring medical smell, one after the other the perfect family offering an arm.

But then where did it go? What did the surgeon do with the carefully removed life-serum? How could you protect it, wherever you stored it, from everything? the disastrous heat, the gutter dirt, the pollution, the things that changed, the terrible leavetakings, the journeying?

They were so still, so stilled. Was that what endurance was?

Is it still life? I'd said out loud as we passed.

Is what? Leif said.

I'd nodded towards the restaurant we'd never have got into.

Even though they're breathing and moving they're like the things in one of those old paintings of globes and skulls and fruits and lutes, I said.

Leif laughed then and winked down at me.

Art hotel, he said.

Excerpted from Gliff by Ali Smith. Copyright © 2025 by Ali Smith. Excerpted by permission of Pantheon Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.