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Gliff
Ali Smith
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Description for Gliff
Trade Paperback.
O brave new world, that has such people in't.
Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.
What does it mean?
It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world.
What would that actually be like?
In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?
And what’s a horse ... Read moregot to do with any of this?
Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it's a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.
'As always, Ali’s inventiveness and intelligence lit fireworks in my mind. Gliff is an irresistible invitation to rethink and reword our way to a truly brave new world' Michelle de Kretser
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Product Details
Place of Publication
London, United Kingdom
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 2 to 4 working days
About Ali Smith
Ali Smith was born in Inverness in 1962. She is the author of several novels and short story collections including, The Accidental, Hotel World, How to Be Both and the Seasonal Quartet. She has been four times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, has won the Goldsmiths Prize, Orwell Prize, Costa Best Novel Award and the Women’s Prize. Ali Smith lives ... Read morein Cambridge. Show Less
Reviews for Gliff
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 ... Read morefutile question
Financial Times
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
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
i
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
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
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 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
Fizzily fresh and vibrant . . . A dark vision brightened by the engaging craft of an inventive writer
Kirkus (starred review)
One of our most playful and political writers
Guardian
Feels like an instant classic
Anna Bonet
i
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
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
A literary collosus . . . Gliff is playful, challenging, and like nothing else we’ve recommended this year!
Bookshop Tales
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