Gliff: A Novel [Hardcover]

WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD • 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.Winner of the Dublin Literary Award
Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize

A Most Anticipated Book from Vogue, New York Times, Bustle, Goodreads, New York Times Book Review Podcast, The Millions, and Literary Hub

“Part of the joy of Gliff is that, while it is a dystopia, there are moments of genuine humor.”
—The New Yorker

“This idea of freedom—the possibility of moving through the world unconfined by a single, determinate category, able to swap identities or shed them altogether—is both Smith’s great theme and a description of her methods. Her books are restless, shape-changing, multifarious enterprises, scrambling conventional definitions of genre…Briar’s narrative of bravery and betrayal is interrupted here and there by fables—one about a woman who gives birth to a baby with a horse’lcÁ