The Latest Breaking News from Ali Smith

Ali Smith’s Glyph is the companion novel to her earlier novel, Gliff (2024). Gliff was set in a surreal near-future dystopia. Glyph, meanwhile, is set in the present. But like Smith’s earlier Seasonal Quartet, it offers the reader an uncanny version of our world, haunted by ghostly voices from the…

This second novel in a sharp duology offers a powerful interrogation of language in the age of mechanical mass destruction

With Something Good, the arts and culture newsletter from The Conversation UK, we aim to cut through the noise and recommend the very best in new releases every fortnight. In 2024, we’ve been spoiled for choice when it comes to recommending fiction. From Samantha Harvey’s spellbinding Booker winner Orbital to…

Olympians and Paralympians attended a Buckingham Palace reception, but only the former were asked to a following event hosted by the luxury food retailer

I’ve always been a history nerd, but it wasn’t until I started working at The Conversation that I really caught the medieval bug. Inspired by our academic experts, I’ve read books, trawled online archives, and when I worked on an article about the Book of Kells earlier this year, I…

Two children decode a dystopia, in a chilling and wistful novel that speaks to our times

“See what a simple line, a visible mark of the utmost simplicity and cheapness, can do to a populace?” In Ali Smith’s new novel, Gliff, that line is painted in crude bright red around the houses of those the state has deemed “unverified”. It means ostracisation, re-education and worse. It…

Ali Smith’s Gliff is set “once upon a time, not very far from now”. It is a kind of fairytale of the future in which two children, Briar and Rose, navigate a world which seems increasingly baffling and hostile.

The author of the seasonal quartet projects her exceptional state-of-the-nation storytelling on to a dystopian tale of a brutal Britain run by totalitarian forces