Glyph - by Ali Smith (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - 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.

Review Quotes

"Feisty, graceful...Her best work since the lauded Seasonal Trilogy...Anglophone author channels molten rage with her level of skill...I won't spoil the conclusion except to note the final three pages alone are worth the price of a hardcover. Once again Smith makes her case beautifully: art points the way forward, enduring across millennia, like those Sumerian tablets, yet transforming itself and us each day."
--Hamilton Cain, Boston Globe

"The social fissuring Smith captures in her pages is indelible...Smith's tonal acuity places us in the room with her characters, and this shot/reverse shot intimacy and immediacy are the novel's power. We breathe in the childhood fears, the maternal affection and unease along with them...A didactic novel that argues for didacticism in our approach to a violently asymmetric world, that exposes our ironic distance (literary or otherwise) from current events for what it is: gutless and craven. To read Glyph is to wonder what, 20 years from now, will be retained of the stories we told ourselves to make sense of this time--that is, the capacity of art and literature to contain it."
--New York Times Book Review

"How does Scottish author Ali Smith manage to offset despair with delight even in novels that tackle serious issues such as loss, grief, war, injustice, and insidious curtailments of freedom? The answer lies partly in her fervent belief in the life-enhancing powers of decency, human connection, and art, which underpins all her work...Pulling off these literary feats with the extra challenges Smith sets for herself makes me think of the nimble dancer Ginger Rogers, about whom it's been said that she did everything Fred Astaire did, albeit backwards and in high heels. As a writer, Smith, too, is light on her feet...Ali Smith--bless her--refuses to shy away from current events and concerns, however sensitive."
--NPR

"Smith touts the untamed imagination as an antidote to the realities of war and subjection. Her writing, always full of jokes and wordplay, is inquisitive, improvisatory...It provides companionship...A burst of innocence amid the grim churn of the news."
--Wall Street Journal

"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

"Smith's writing, with its frisky inventiveness, experimentation and wordplay, is the closest thing to living, breathing prose. . . . There's great value in bearing witness, and over the course of the seven novels that Smith has published in the past decade, she's compiled a dynamic and engaging portrait of the way we live. . . . Brilliant."
--Financial Times

"Smith embraces angular, fragmented storytelling along with slippery and allegorical messaging, though her characterizations are lively and crystal clear. . . . An abstract and mordant meditation on the long aftereffects of violence."
--Kirkus, starred review

"Smith deploys misdirection, humor, and the voice of Patch's teenage daughter to raise issues of morality, power, and conflict. Described as a modern Virginia Woolf and as a Nobelist-in-waiting, the multi-award-winning and Man Booker-nominated Smith is a modern oracle."
--Library Journal

"[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

"Glyph runs through the present and the past . . . with typically Smithian imaginative flourishes. . . . [and] the playfulness that has always been a big part of her work."
--The Times

"A clever and enjoyable companion piece to [Gliff]. . . . Smith effectively deploys narrative devices that will be familiar to readers of her fiction--precocious children, rapturous wordplay, and references to current events. . . . [An] accomplished and gifted writer."
--Publishers Weekly

"Rich with [Smith's] sparkling digressions, literary allusion, and social conscience. . . . [Glyph] celebrates the power of civil disobedience through one act of decency at a time."
--Booklist

"Smith shows us that private pain and public violence are not separate systems. It asks whether we are paying attention, not just to our own histories, but to what is happening, very plainly, in front of us. . . . What makes Glyph so compelling is its tonal confidence. It's funny without being flippant, political without being sanctimonious. By the final pages, this feels like one of Smith's most vital novels--restless, tender, angry, and alive to contradiction."
--Irish Independent

"[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

"Smart and bleakly funny, Glyph is fuelled by incredulity at the state of contemporary England. . . . The author manages to estrange readers from reality by doing nothing more than describing things exactly as they are."
--The Irish Times

"[Glyph is] about paying attention; about noticing the world's horrors around us and using fiction to hold the moment to account."
--The Spectator

"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

"A wide, free-wheeling meditation on war, told with Smith's usual punning brio."
--The Daily Mail

"It is impossible not to be struck by [Smith's] mastery . . . her clever wordplay, her unapologetically metafictional storytelling and her obvious dedication to the message and the meaning of what it is that she writes. . . . Glyph moves effortlessly back and forth between the past and the present, cleverly playing with E.M. Forster's observations about 'flat' and 'round' characters in fiction whilst eschewing traditional, realist storytelling conventions. . . . Smith's metafiction converges and divides, rises and falls, all with a gleeful knowingness and arch humour. . . . [A] remarkable and utterly unique novel from one of the finest writers working today."
--The Sydney Morning Herald

"Among contemporary novelists, Ali Smith stands out for her engagement with the political moment, as well as with her fondness for wordplay and what it reveals about the language we use. . . . Glyph engages directly with the wreckage of war, be it in Gallipoli or Gaza, with characters being flattened both literally and symbolically. . . . There are frequent puns and playfulness, pointing out that language can represent reality but also distort it. The surreal is mixed with the real, and characters discuss other stories and books, including--nod, wink--the earlier Gliff. . . . For Smith, the antidote to a 'flattened' world, whether by tanks or by technology, is the enduring, regenerative power of narrative. . . . Within these layers of fiction and memory, her characters find the resilience to remain whole even in a culture that would prefer them shredded. In this sense, Glyph acts as a counterweight to what Frederic Jameson termed the 'depthlessness' of modern life. It indicates that a heightened imagination is not an escape from reality, but an essential tool for truly engaging with it, accompanied by a radical form of care."
--The Hindu

"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

"[Smith's] writing is effervescent with kindness, challenging the violence of a political landscape that seeks to confound, divide and conquer. . . . [Glyph] unpicks how truth is warped in our time of genocides."
--Big Issue

"Few writers are as playful as Ali Smith, who seems to delight in the process of putting words onto the page in as artful a way as possible. This is clear before you even begin her latest novel, the title Glyph immediately recalling her previous Gliff. . . . But where Gliff was set in a dystopian future, Glyph looks to the past. It's a ghost story which is at its heart a treatise on the horrors of war, lamenting that we never seem to learn lessons from what has gone before. . . . Glyph proffers that the stories we tell, and how we tell them, matter greatly."
--The Skinny

"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

"Literary modernism meets your not-so-typical ghost story in Ali Smith's Glyph. . . . Any fan of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce or Jack Kerouac will enjoy Smith's assimilation of small factual details from history into a spectre for modern times."
--The Indiependent

"[Smith's] most urgent and politically resonant book to date. . . . [A] page-turner."
--t2ONLINE

"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

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.