About the Book
From a literary master, a novel of ghosts and history and family legacy, of the unexpected acts of care that shine light into our dark.
Ghosts don't exist.
They don't. End of.
Story, however.
It is haunting.
Everything tells it.
It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost.
Is it imaginary? Is it real?
Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom.
What to do? She phones her sister.
In a chiarascuro dance through our increasingly antagonistic era, Glyph asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making.
A funny, warm and clear-eyed take on where we are now, Glyph is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness. This anti-war novel, Ali Smith’s most soulful, playful and vital yet, is a work of lightness that goes deep to counter the forces currently flattening the modern world.
About the Author :
ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Companion Piece, the "Seasonal Quartet," Public library and other stories, and How to be both, which won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel Award. Her work has four times been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Most recently, she won the George Orwell Prize for Political Fiction for Summer. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.
Review :
"Glyph’s primary power comes from its commitment to excavating the sediments of language; its etymological resonance and inference. . . . Smith’s tonal skill as a writer is also used to great effect when dealing with . . . bureaucratic, authoritarian absurdity. . . . It is a bold move to be so morally unflinching, especially in the face of a perceived aesthetic orthodoxy that so often privileges distance and irony, but in Glyph we see a major British writer answering the call of the day when so many others have equivocated or turned away. There is also something about Smith’s relentless focus on language that makes her particularly well suited to the task. . . . Smith’s sensibility is fine-tuned to grapple with the avalanche of passive-voice headlines, asymmetric categorisations, outright linguistic inversions and semantic absurdities that have accompanied the increasingly desperate attempts to justify the unjustifiable."
—The Guardian
"[Glyph] offers the reader an uncanny version of our world, haunted by ghostly voices from the past. . . . Smith teasingly draws attention to the different levels of reality at work in the novel. . . . Although it can be read as a standalone work, Glyph inevitably invites the reader to explore its relationship with Gliff (2024). . . . The duology forms a kind of textual Möbius strip—a mind-bending twisted loop with just one side—perhaps nodding back to the double strands of Smith’s 2014 novel How to be Both. . . . Like all of Smith’s works, Glyph is multifaceted. She is equally adroit at capturing the emotional nuances of family life, mapping out the larger political landscape, or beguiling the reader with joyfully witty metafictional and linguistic games. . . . Irresistible."
—The Conversation
"[Smith is] an exceptionally gifted storyteller. . . . She can bring any sentence alive with the verve of her wordplay, as her characters spark off one another in speech, echoing, patterning and discovering the energy contained in a single moment. . . . Smith's capacity for hope is infectious, and the hope posited by these books is that storytelling can restore not just our humanity but our political responsibility and agency. . . . Between them, Gliff and Glyph offer a world of endlessly proliferating gliffs: slivers of conscience that Smith imbues with a power that is not illusory simply because it is imagined. Indeed, Smith suggests that made-up stories may, at this point, be the least illusory things we have."
—New Statesman
"A playful, melancholy story of sibling bonds, unreliable memory and the tales we use to keep the dead close. It’s also a powerful anti-war novel, with Palestine firmly in its sights."
—The Observer
"Vital. . . . Smith’s genius lies in her ability to wrap these huge, knotted ideas inside a tender, human story. . . . Powerful, playful with language, fearless with thought, and always alert to what’s possible."
—Buzz Magazine
"Moving between childhood and adulthood, reality and invention, Smith’s latest is a follow-up to 2024’s Gliff but can be read as a stand-alone. As ever with this author, the novel is playful without being slight, and alert to the present moment while committed to imagination."
—The i Paper
"Glyph follows on from Ali Smith's 2024 novel, Gliff, which tells a story hidden in the first. The less you know about it the better as you immerse yourself back into Smith's world."
—Radio Times
