Gliff
A Novel
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4.0 • 12 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing
An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.
Add two children. And a horse.
From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Smith (How to Be Both) delivers an ingenious speculative novel in which two children come to terms with the mysteries of their unnamed country, which carries a whiff of post-Brexit England. The narrator, a 16-year-old boy named Brice, accompanies his younger sister, Rose, to see off their mother after she's forced to leave for work in a far-off city. Upon returning to their house, the siblings find it encircled with a red line. As the story progresses, it becomes clear their mother is a whistleblower who has exposed the wrongdoings of a weed-killer conglomerate, and that critics of this society, deemed "unverifiables," are subject to repressive measures with frightening Orwellian echoes. Out wandering one day, Rose comes upon a field with seven "beautiful and mangy" horses including Gliff, a gray horse who becomes a symbol of natural beauty and freedom for the siblings. Smith makes the most of her protagonists' youthful perspectives to bring a sense of wonder, inquisitiveness, and pathos to the story, which sees Rose and Brice link up with a motley crew of other kids also deemed unverifiables. As in the author's Seasonal Quartet series, 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.
