Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house. What does it mean? It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world. What would that actually be like? In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take? In Ali Smith’s warning of how society can slip into totalitarianism, the hostile environment in Britain is taken to extremes. Anyone who does not comply with social norms is labelled an “unverifiable” and their house marked for destruction. When young siblings Bri and Rose are left to fend for themselves after their corporate whistleblower mother goes on the run, they find out the true extent of the disturbing world they inhabit. Further deepening this narrative world is Smith’s 2026 follow-up ‘Glyph’, which reveals a story hidden within ‘Gliff’’s pages.