Gliff

Fizzily fresh and vibrant . . . A dark vision brightened by the engaging craft of an inventive writer

Kirkus (starred review)

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

Financial Times

A literary collosus . . . Gliff is playful, challenging, and like nothing else we’ve recommended this year!

Bookshop Tales

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

Daily Mail

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

Harper’s Bazaar

One of our most playful and political writers

Guardian, 'Books to Look Forward to'

Feels like an instant classic

Anna Bonet

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

Holly Williams

As usual with Smith, the gorgeous prose will swirl in your head. Gliff is challenging and enigmatic

Martin Chilton, Independent

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

Observer

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

Daily Telegraph

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

New Statesman

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

Daily Mirror

Entertaining and sophisticated and clever

The Scotsman

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

Evening Standard

An exhilarating and often startling read . . . Ali Smith looks at a sentence the way a mechanic looks at an old car engine. She takes her wrench and deconstructs an unsuspecting word into its constituent parts, swaps one element for another or adds something she felt was missing, then reveals with a flourish that her word has become a brave new world

Literary Review

Ali Smith has never been afraid to take cleverness seriously . . . But the cleverness she celebrates is innate and ordinary. It is human, in other words, and Gliff is the mark of just such a native genius

Paraic O’Donnell, Guardian

A study, a confrontation, a rejoinder, a folksong: Ali Smith's marvellous Gliff considers the complexities of our present moment and the thorny, bridling potential of possible futures with wit, care and craft. A masterpiece of storytelling about storytelling, exploring the delighting, dangerous power of language and connectivity

The Spectator, 'Books of the Year'

A witty dystopian puzzle built on ‘unbelievable believable hope' . . . Smith’s worlds are always perfect-pitch, but the genius of Gliff left me blasted

The Spectator, 'Books of the Year 2024'

Playfully charts two children’s resistance to a state dystopia of surveillance and control

Guardian, 'The best fiction of 2024'

As for my stocking: Ali Smith’s Gliff, please

Olivia Laing, Guardian, 'Books of the year 2024'

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

Paul Murray, The Irish Times, 'Books of the year'

Part allegory, part dystopian fiction, altogether thrilling . . . one of the most affecting stories about resistance to blind power I have read . . . quite simply the best book I’ve read this year

Irish Times

A remarkable read; poignant, perfect, and utterly terrifying

The Skinny

Ingenious, warm storytelling. With clever kindness, Smith speaks to the uprisings that are possible, when we collaborate in a divided world. Through defiant wordsmithery, Gliff glimmers with the perennial resistance that storytelling can offer

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