Gliff

“An ingenious speculative novel.... Extraordinary.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing.

Set in an uncertain future, where children are recruited by the surveillance state and new boundaries are drawn between people daily, Gliff begins when two siblings, Rose and Briar, are deposited by their mother's partner, Leif, in an empty house, in a city entirely new to them. Left alone while Leif goes to get their mother, the children must fend for themselves for the first time in their lives, subsisting off canned goods and tentatively venturing into their new surroundings. Their most constant companion is a horse they've found in the pasture out back, a horse they name Gliff, a horse slated to be taken to the slaughterhouse in a few days.

From a Scottish word meaning a "transient moment" or "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, matters more than ever.