“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.”
—Publishers Weekly (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.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“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.”
—The Times
"As ever, Smith delights in sportive wordplay…In Smith’s refinement of the Orwellian vision, no boots are required. There’s just the computer saying ‘no,’ for ever…Smith’s natural mode of discourse, in the best way, resembles the questing and venturesome learning strategies of children…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.”
—The Guardian
“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 Observer
“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 Independent
“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.”
—The Telegraph
“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 New Statesman
“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 Daily Mail
“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 Scotsman
“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 Irish Times
“This is a book huge in scope, its frame of reference enormous…It will leave you breathless, and reaching for a dictionary…But it is also a story about two children who have lost their mother, with moments that are spare and full of powerful feeling.”
—The Evening Standard
“Gliff demonstrates Ali Smith’s characteristic strengths as a novelist. The narrative is accessible and engaging, yet at the same time complex and subtle.”
—The Conversation
“Another magnificent book to be treasured…If the story remains effervescent in spite of this wickedness, that’s because of Ali Smith’s 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, in mocking the establishment by opposing its tyrannical narratives.”
—Big Issue
“Tantalising stuff, from one of our most playful writers, proving it’s still possible to be genuinely inventive with the novel form…Smith creates these futures with a lightness of touch…It all feels only a few steps from our own time, with anti-immigrant paranoia, willing complicity in technological surveillance, and exploitative capitalism braiding ever-tighter together to create a society both horribly dystopian and perilously close…As such, Gliff seems as much a conduit for Smith’s feelings about the state of our current world as the Seasonal Quartet did: she has a wry eye for the petty absurdities, as well as the cruelties, of how bureaucratic institutions function…Behind everything, is a deep anger at the inhumanity of it all…But this being an Ali Smith book, it’s also all about language. She’s as frisky with it as ever, peppering with puns, and making hay with homonyms…Smith imbues her characters, as she often does, with this linguistic exuberance. It’s a delight to read line-by-line…Gliff is surely one of Smith’s most propulsive stories—a dark adventure, with high stakes, that despite its bleak subject matter is still a sparklingly crisp read.”
—iNews
