Ali Smith looks at a sentence the way a mechanic looks at an old car engine. She takes her wrench and deconstructs an unsuspecting word into its constituent parts, swaps one element for another or adds something she felt was missing, then reveals with a flourish that her word has become a brave new world. Smith has been up to this for some time. In her third novel, The Accidental, a precocious twelve-year-old named Astrid Smart thinks ‘nobody is any the wiser’ that she is awake, then flips the thought inside out and imagines somebody named ‘Any the Wiser’; in Autumn, the Booker Prize-shortlisted opener to Smith’s seasonal quartet, one grown-up male character tells a younger female one that she doesn’t want to go to ‘college’, but wants to go to ‘collage’ instead; in a 2023 lecture at Newnham College, Cambridge, Smith took her audi­ence on ‘a roam of our own’ around the first word of Virginia Woolf’s book-length essay A Room of One’s Own. 

Her new novel, Gliff, tells the story of two young siblings faced with a problem too big to solve, though they reassure each other that what they can do is ‘salve’ it. Bri and Rose return home with their mother’s partner, Leif, to find that someone has painted a red line around their house. Leif packs them into a campervan but someone paints a red line around that too. Then he deposits his charges in an empty house with enough tinned food to last them two weeks. They are alone and afraid, huddling under duffel coats for warmth and saving tins of creamed rice for the best days.

The novel is set in the near future and narrated by Bri, who is thirteen when their house is outlined. Although at first the childish narration feels clunky, full of repetitions and simplistic descriptions, I quickly became accustomed to it and even found Bri’s observations charming – a steep grassy bank,