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Summary and Reviews of Gliff by Ali Smith

Gliff by Ali Smith

Gliff

A Novel

by Ali Smith
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (16):
  • First Published:
  • Feb 4, 2025, 288 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing.

An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.

Add two children. And a horse.

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 individual complexities, matter more than ever.

Excerpt
Gliff

Our mother came down to the docking gate to say cheerio to us. For a moment I didn't recognize her. I thought she was just a woman working at the hotel. She had her hair scraped back off her face and tied in a ponytail and she was wearing clothes so unlike her and so not quite right for her shape that it took me that moment to work out they were her sister's work clothes, the uniform they made the women and girls here wear, white shirt, long black pinafore apron/ skirt thing. The men and boys who worked here got to look more casual. Their uniform was designer jeans and white T-shirts made of stuff that was better than what ordinary T-shirts get made of. The women and girls weren't allowed make up or earrings or necklaces. Our mother looked smaller, duller, scrubbed clean and cloistery, like serving women from humbled countries look in films on TV.

How is she doing today? Leif asked.

How long will she be ill? my own sister asked.

Our mother gave my sister a look for being rude....

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

An ominous vision of a dystopian future of techno-totalitarianism, Gliff is a cautionary tale all too relevant for our current day—a time when surveillance technology is increasingly prevalent, algorithms control the information we see through our social media feeds, a handful of tech oligarchs have growing political sway, and democratic institutions are in decline worldwide. The book deals with dark topics—oppression, inequality, prejudice—but it is also about individual resilience, human connection, and meaning. Those are heavy themes, but Smith writes with a light touch, lacing the narration with playful cultural references, humor, puns, double meanings, and whimsical flourishes. Indeed, elements of the book read like a fairy tale or fable...continued

Full Review (1397 words)

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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach).

Media Reviews

New York Times Book Review Podcast
This reminded me of V for Vendetta…These are memorable kids, they're smart, they're funny…It's fantastic.

The New Yorker
Part of the joy of Gliff is that, while it is a dystopia, there are moments of genuine humor.

Vogue
Chilling…Orwellian…Strangely compelling…It's a vivid portrait of a decaying civilization—one snuffed out not with a bang but with a bleak, bureaucratic whimper.

Irish Daily Mail (UK)
Smith once again stakes her claim to be among the most inventive writers—Gliff is another fizzing firework display, with conceptual shenanigans and punning prose put in the service of hot-button social issues.

Irish Times (UK)
Ali Smith's miraculous Gliff is at once a pitch-black take on the authoritarian future and a tender, hilarious and ultimately uplifting portrait of two young siblings as they battle to escape it. Full of jokes and wordplay, kindness and connection…A ray of hope after a year like this one.

The Irish Times (UK)
An altogether thrilling read…A call to arms that, crucially, doesn't read like one…There is nothing didactic about Smith's style of storytelling…Smith's genius is to show us this world—our sudden, chance view—and at the same time ask us to consider how such horrors might be prevented…The siblings are wonderfully drawn…Smith's command over the story, her ease with the dystopian genre, allows her to play with form throughout the book, with word games that elucidate her themes…With Gliff she delivers a moving, insightful treatise on the overlapping crises affecting the world today…The depressing subject matter is lightened by Smith's humour and whimsy…Smith's dystopia, with its mix of light and shade, is reminiscent of the writing of George Saunders.

The Scotsman (UK)
After the breakneck, up-to-the-minute nature of the seasonal quartet and its epilogue, Gliff's 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 Times (UK)
If it were not pretty certain that she would hate the idea, you could almost describe Ali Smith as a national treasure…Gliff opens with style and intrigue…Few writers are as good as Smith at reminding us that novels are constructed, brick by brick, from individual words…The language is so rich and dazzling.

Guardian (UK)
The way those who find themselves on the outer edges of our society are treated has always been a signal theme of Smith's work…In the end our hope lies in Bri and Rose, in their generation, in outsiders. And if 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 Independent (UK)
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 New Statesman (UK)
In recent years Ali Smith has mastered a style that is both disconcerting and utterly humane…Gliff is unendingly playful. Even in her 18th book, Smith does not tire of the wonder of language. It is also her most damning critique of Big Tech yet…The meaning and meaninglessness of our words is an overarching theme of Smith's oeuvre…As Smith makes clear in this typically far-reaching and mind-expanding book, the true meaning of a word is made by those who use it.

The Telegraph (UK)
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.

Booklist (starred review)
After a run of inspired novels in which the author drew on some of the most troubling contemporary events to inspire hopeful and defiant narratives, Smith's latest pivots towards a dystopian near-future while retaining all her brilliant insight, wit, and humanity…This fable-like story gradually reveals a Huxleyan society (Smith offers clever riffs on 'brave new world') in which the border is at once nowhere and everywhere, and anyone who acts out of line can be wrong-sided. Confronting themes of surveillance and fascism, Orwell Prize for Political Fiction–winner Smith's latest is a timely gift for readers.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
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.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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.

Reader Reviews

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Beyond the Book



Red Lines and Anticipatory Obedience

No symbol with a drawing of a person holding out their handIn Ali Smith's Gliff, two children living in a sinister surveillance state in the not-too-distant future return home to find a line of red paint circling their house. In this dystopian society where all-pervasive technology tracks and controls every aspect of people's lives, these red painted lines are used to flag those who have been judged to be socially unacceptable, marking them off from the rest of society.

On a symbolic level, these red painted circles are a brilliantly evocative image, calling to mind the red circles a teacher inks around mistakes or a proofreader's marks flagging text for deletion or correction. Inevitably, there are also echoes of the term "redlining"—discrimination through systematic exclusion—...

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Read-Alikes

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