Gliff

September 1, 2024

The book's title comes from a Scottish word meaning a shock or a faint glimpse, which is appropriate for award-winning Smith's (Companion Piece) genre-bending near-future novel, expected to be the first in a duology. The story explores the search for meaning and the importance of humanity in an uncertain future, where algorithms and data predict, dominate, and divide. Prepub Alert.

Copyright 2024 Library Journal

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2024
Two siblings find ways to get by on their own in a challenging near-future world. Rose is about 11 and Briar 13 when their mother goes abroad to help her ailing sister. Soon after, her partner, Leif, leaves to retrieve her. The youngsters have food, money, and a place to stay, but so much is uncertain: When will Leif return? Will he find their mother? Why has someone painted a red line around their house? Adventurous Rose soon befriends a horse named Gliff, while Briar meets a rebellious old woman named Oona. The siblings' uneasy daily life changes for the better when they find the abandoned school occupied by Oona and other resourceful squatters, who provide a home for Gliff and the welcome company of adults. But always in the worrying background is a government seeking to define people by their online personal data and to quell dissent. The siblings' mother had been fired for whistleblowing at a weedkiller company and seems to have inspired her kids to distrust the state's data fixation (she herself is never named in the novel). When the story shifts briefly to five years later, Briar appears in a corporate environment and meets an assembly-line worker who knew Rose in a way that suggests the siblings got separated. Throughout the meandering plot, narrator and older sibling Briar (whose gender is withheld for most of the book) narrates much of the story's angst. But that mood is frequently lightened by the author's gift for conveying a fizzily fresh and vibrant young person's mind. Other familiar Smith subjects here include government intrusiveness, the closing of public libraries, environmental degradation, the pernicious effects of technology, and the delights of language. A dark vision brightened by the engaging craft of an inventive writer.

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Starred review from September 30, 2024
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. Agent: Tracey Bohan, Wylie Agency.

December 13, 2024

Award-winning Smith (A Cage Went in Search of a Bird) sets her latest novel in a future dystopian society. Her book centers on two preadolescents, Briar and Rose. When their mother leaves to work at a hotel, and her boyfriend abandons the children, Briar and Rose squat in an empty house, which is eventually demolished. They are "unverifiables," a group without status that the government wants to control. After discovering and adopting a horse that Rose names Gliff, they live with other unverifiables in an abandoned school. Their world becomes a totalitarian nightmare, with rampant pollution, homelessness, no libraries, and persecution. Government agents eventually capture Briar, while Rose and Gliff escape. Jumping ahead five years, the story turns to Briar, now known as Alan Dale, who works as a department head in charge of a factory production line, some of whose employees, for whom Alan/Briar has little empathy, have been mutilated by handling battery acid at work. VERDICT Smith succeeds in spinning a grim tale about semiotics, history, literature, and art that ends on a somewhat hopeful note.--Jacqueline Snider

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 1, 2025
After a run of inspired novels in which the author drew on some of the most troubling contemporary events to inspire hopeful and defiant narratives, Smith's latest pivots towards a dystopian near future while retaining all her brilliant insight, wit, and humanity. Siblings Briar and Rose are separated from their mother, who has resorted to off-the-books work after an act of corporate whistle-blowing cost her any secure position. After their home is impounded and their rations at a temporary shelter run low, the children resolve to fend for themselves. Self-confident Rose takes a shine to a horse living in a field nearby and names it Gliff, an old Scottish word with a wealth of meanings. The tech-savvy and nonbinary Bri befriends a grownup activist living off-grid in an abandoned school compound where the siblings, with Gliff in tow, seek sanctuary. The first in a pair of novels that are related yet stand on their own (Glyph will follow), this fable-like story gradually reveals a Huxleyan society (Smith offers clever riffs on Brave New World) in which the border is at once nowhere and everywhere, and anyone who acts out of line can be wrong-sided. Confronting themes of surveillance and fascism, Orwell Prize for Political Fiction-winner Smith's latest is a timely gift for readers.

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