GLIFF

The first of two new, interconnected novels from bestselling, award-winning, Booker-Prize shortlisted author Ali Smith

Following her dazzling five-novel portrait of our age, the ''Seasonal'' sequence, Ali Smith returns with the first of twonovels which belong together but can be read independently.

Gliff - a Scots or Northern word for a glimpse, a shock, a glance - will not only tell its own story but also contain within it a hidden story, to be revealed only in a second novel, Glyph - from the Greek, meaning a mark, carving or symbol - to be published a year later.

In form and feeling, Gliff will light a new, fabular and fabulist path for Ali Smith and for us through the gathering darkness of our chaotic times.