Gliff

Audiobook

English language

Published Oct. 31, 2024 by Penguin Books Ltd..

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 got 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 …

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 got 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.

4 editions

enne📚 reviewed Gliff: A Novel by Ali Smith

5 stars

I quite enjoyed this book.

Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?

Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?

Gliff is a surveillance dystopia novel—thematically about words, borders, and questions about authentic reality.

The point of view in this book is a child being raised on the margins of a system; they're an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite understand everything enough about the world to lay it out explicitly for the reader.

Stylistically, the writing is a stream of consciousness in the narrator's head, relating the past. Sometimes not having quotation marks for speech can feel jarring for me as a …

I quite enjoyed this book.

Was a horse more lost to the world, because of no words, or was the horse more found – or even founded – in the world because of no words?

Were we in our worded world the ones who were truly deluded about where and what we believed about all the things we had words for?

Gliff is a surveillance dystopia novel—thematically about words, borders, and questions about authentic reality.

The point of view in this book is a child being raised on the margins of a system; they're an unreliable narrator who doesn't quite understand everything enough about the world to lay it out explicitly for the reader.

Stylistically, the writing is a stream of consciousness in the narrator's head, relating the past. Sometimes not having quotation marks for speech can feel jarring for me as a reader, but somehow here it lent itself to a feeling in the narrator's head, of a story being told stream of consciousness style. Because this book focuses on words, there's also some fun wordplay.

Despite being a dystopian story, all of this gives it a dreamy quality that I quite enjoyed.