Gliff

Reviews

A vivid, alluringly chatty novelist capable of deft and unforeseeable sidesteps . . . Smith’s new novel is a charm . . . Smith excels at the creation of a lost, curious, intelligent mind adrift in a world of surprises and the unforeseen . . . Smith has created a gloriously strange world Gliff is one of Smith’s most propulsive stories – a dark adventure with high stakes, which, despite its bleak subject matter, is still a sparklingly crisp read . . . Typically tantalising stuff from one of our most playful writers . . . [Smith] is as frisky as ever, peppering with puns, and making hay with homonyms imbues her characters with this linguistic exuberance . . . A new Ali Smith book is always an event Ali Smith stakes her claim amongst the most inventive living British writers . . . Gliff is another fizzing firework display, with conceptual shenanigans and running prose put in the service of hot-button social issues . . . a freewheeling narrative that mixes jeopardy-laden drama with restless digression on everything from agrochemicals to AI As usual with Smith, the gorgeous prose will swirl in your head. Gliff is challenging and enigmatic 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 One of our most playful and political writers Feels like an instant classic The inimitable Ali Smith returns to beguile . . . Smith movingly explores the notion of resistance, and asks, in a voice full of hope, what a world should, and could, be A literary collosus . . . Gliff is playful, challenging, and like nothing else we’ve recommended this year! Fizzily fresh and vibrant . . . A dark vision brightened by the engaging craft of an inventive writer Unendingly playful [and] mind-expanding . . . Gliff draws battle lines between art, language and Big Tech . . . The meaning and meaningless of our words is an overarching theme of Smith’s oeuvre . . . Smith does not tire of the wonder of language [and] has mastered a style that is both disconcerting and utterly humane A poetic, dystopian puzzlebox . . . a story about two children who have lost their mother, with moments that are spare and full of powerful feeling . . . Gliff is above all a book that forces you to be comfortable with ambiguity. It will be partnered next year by Glyph, a companion novel which promises to reveal a story hidden in this one. It will be a joy to puzzle it out As she takes aim at some of the more worrying aspects of the modern world, Smith employs sublime wordplay, a tribute to language and its possibilities Entertaining and sophisticated and clever Here is a voice that moves with lightness and precision, where bravery and goodness triumph in spirit over jeopardy and fear . . . Smith is good at fable-ising, and at taking a young perspective in order to question afresh systems and inherited knowledge . . . Smith’s fiction teaches with vitality that there is no such thing as a futile question Expand reviews