Glyph

Gliff #2

by Ali Smith

Glyph follows Ali Smith's 2024 novel Gliff and tells a story hidden in the first novel. Gliff is set in a near future rife with surveillance, where people can be labelled 'unverifiable' by the state. It follows siblings Briar and Rose as they attempt to survive in a world that strives to crush curiosity and meaning.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, British Literature, Science Fiction, Novels, Contemporary

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2026

About the author

Ali Smith is a writer, born in Inverness, Scotland, to working-class parents. She was raised in a council house in Inverness and now lives in Cambridge. She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia, she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. She has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 17 years and dedicates all her books to her.

Reviews

[emma]

more literary novels should have sequels

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all]]

yesssssssssssssssssssssssss can't wait

[Lee · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.5) I'm cured again, for now.

[Ari Levine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5, review to come

[Lien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Can’t say I understood everything but I sure loved reading this.

[Ryan Davison · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1996, two young sisters are at a family anniversary party when an old lady tells them about a flattened body she encountered on a French road during WWII. An odd story indeed but it begins older sister, Petra, pretending to be able to speak to the dead man in order to calm her somewhat traumatized younger sister's nerves. Well, neighborhood rumors circulate, and Petra gets the reputation of a medium. A girl appears on their doorstep begging to talk to her dead dog, adults appear with wads of money insisting to speak to lost loved ones, and ominously, Petra is warned by her dying mother to stay away from these dark games.

An intriguing mystical vibe runs through Glyph, and the plot begins and advances in modern day, while gradually flashing back to the sister's childhoods in 1996. But expect the nonlinear, for there are scenes that include the the flattened man (pre-flattening), a blind horse, Petra’s sister’s very entertaining adopted daughter, and other bits and pieces. This is a nontraditional narrative in many ways but the prose is extremely well constructed and full of word play. We drop into each new sequence smoothly because of its authenticity. The dynamic between the sisters keeps the reader most interested in this radically creative book with a lot going on.

Perhaps the invented a ghost to prepare for the passing of their own dying mother but no matter the reason, the author prunes the concept in wildly imaginative ways. This is a book to read and discuss, as you are left reflecting on the ideas presented well after the last page.

Highly recommended to fan of literary fiction. Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for a review copy.

[Madeline Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning! The best writing of children since Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend and Yiyun Li's The Book of Goose. All about stories and storytelling, ghosts, sisters and memory. Loved!

[Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this as an ARC and was unaware it was a sequel of sorts. That being said, it was a great read as a standalone novel. The prose was truly beautiful to read. The interactions between the sisters at different ages perfectly encapsulated what it is like to have a sibling; those late night conversations and the innate act of helping your sibling feel better or safe. I will be picking up Gliff next as I am not ready to for this to end yet.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sisters’ relationship is beautifully constructed, the way they navigate impending grief, and how that same bond is what ultimately drives them apart. One of my favourite Ali Smith novels.

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ali Smith is a critically acclaimed Scottish writer & academic. In addition to her published novels & short story collections Smith has also written several plays (mostly unpublished) and is a regular contributor to a number of UK publications.
Glyph, a companion piece to 2024’s Gliff, is her 15th published novel.

The story is narrated, mostly via recollection, by sisters Petra & Patch. Close in childhood, the sisters are estranged following the death of their father. Contact is reestablished when Patch, who is reading Gliff on the recommendation of her adopted daughter, Bill, is reminded of events from their childhood and sends a copy of the book to Petra. Petra having split with her partner as well as losing her job later calls on Patch for help when the past makes a dramatic reappearance in her life.

Smith uses the framework of the siblings looking back on a traumatic period in their childhoods to cut a swathe through history placing stories of the quashing of dissenting individuals during the first & second world wars side by side with current political events ranging from government moves to repress protest, the exploitation of increasing xenophobia & racism to the genocide in Gaza.

As always with Ali Smith, there is plenty to go at. Glyph incorporates themes of individuality, independence of thought, how to find one’s way in a post-truth world.

“But I think partly I was also sick because of the pile on, the people saying it wasn’t true, because I also saw how, like, there’s this huge mechanism and it’s acting on everybody. It is such a simple mechanism it is actually stealthy brilliance. You just say something that’s the truth is a lie. Or that something that’s a lie is the truth. Then the matter of something being true or not stops being about truth or lies and becomes about choosing a side and it drops itself like a blanket over everything, a blanket the size of the sky – no, maybe more like a net, like a gigantic fishing net,”

The interconnectedness of everything, how the past informs the present, what is eternal in us are recurrent themes in Smith’s work. In Glyph, we see history loop and repeat, how the traumas of the past haunt the psyche- both collectively & individually.

Glyph also addresses the role literature & specifically the novel plays in today’s world. Petra, whose own bookshelves contain predominantly factual works is not as impressed by Gliff as either Patch or Bill,

“Yeah. It was okay, I say. It was quite good. I thought it was quite well written and everything. A bit too dark for me. A bit too clever-clever, a bit too on the nose politically, for a novel. I’d have preferred a bit more world building. And what’s with all that horse stuff? It could’ve been a bit more sci-fi. But yeah, I mean thanks for sending it.”

Smith has long been an advocate of the novel as a political form that connects “word & world”. Her 2017 Goldsmiths Prize lecture talks at length about the topic

“What can the novel do, in the age of Trump, in the age of the Nazis, in the age again of wounding and widening division and bordering? It can tell us where and how the people of the age are living it. It can tell us what it means, on the continuum, if we choose to continue to live like that. It can give us an experience that’s emotionally intelligent, a dimensionalising, inclusive experience.”

One review I read of Gliff was critical of Smith’s spelling things out too much, the reviewer felt it lessened the dread a reader experiences with writers such as Kafka where it is left to the imagination. Sometimes though things do need to be spelt out. In Glyph Ali Smith is being even more ‘blatant’ - to use her own word - naming names & carving it in stone.

If this makes the book sound heavy going, that isn’t the case at all. This is the most playful of Smith’s novels that I have read to date. Those of the same generation as Smith who are familiar with UK culture will immediately recognise Petra & Patch as the names of the first two Blue Peter dogs, Petra being the mother of Patch. I like to think of that as Smith having fun with us trying to puzzle that one out
As per usual, humour is never far below the surface and it is a delight to experience the absolute magic Smith works with words - turning language inside out and upside down. She has just as much fun with form - Smith stepping in as herself to direct the action, characters referring to themselves as ‘flat’, rather than rounded. In a time when language is hijacked, distorted and played back in its mirror world form it is sheer pleasure to see someone capable of turning it back around again.

There were a couple of occasions whilst reading Glyph that I thought of Omar El Akkad’s disillusionment at his faith in the ideals of the west. It is refreshing to see Smith nail her colours firmly to the mast.


Gliff & Glyph, hand in hand.
Several reviews have likened the pairing of Gliff & Glyph to Smiths’s 2014 novel How To Be Both made up of two separate but intertwined stories set centuries apart. The stories can be read independently and in either order - the book was issued in two editions, one leading with the contemporary story, the other with that set during the Renaissance.
Gliff & Glyph are complete novels in their own right. Reading both adds an extra dimension. Order doesn’t really matter, although personally, I am pleased I read them in the order of publication.
There are a number of parallels that can be drawn between Gliff & Glyph. Both are centred on siblings with ‘absent’ parents. Both have their biggest hope in the young.
The story of the ruler who killed his enemy only to be haunted by his death echoes the story of The Tyrant & The Ashes told by Ayesha Falcon in Gliff. Petra - the ‘rose-city of Jordan’ with buildings carved directly into the landscape brings to mind the caves that Rose & her companions fled to, as well as indirectly referencing Rose herself.
And of course those horses.

[victoria marie]

30 october 2025 release

[Emma Rund · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ali Smith, my girl! Yet another hit.

'Ghosts don't exist. They don't. End of. Story, however. It is haunting. Everything tells it."

Ali Smith is an author who loves to play with words. Maybe it trips you up a little now and then, but I read it as little bursts of poetry. There are so many double meanings in her work that I love to stumble upon.

Glyph, a follow up to her novel Gliff, tells the story of two sisters, Petra and Patch, as they imagine dead people (and a horse) back to life. I think Glyph might hold different meanings for every reader, but for me, Glyph is about learning from the past, being crippled by empathy for other people's pain and suffering while the rest of the world seems not to care, sight-or lack of it, horses, death, truth, and storytelling (both the good and bad kinds). I think I'd need to read this about four more times to parse through all the recurring motifs, but even on a first read this was deeply affecting, and I love every minute of it.

I'm buying a physical copy as soon as this comes out so I can annotate it to bits.

[Rendezvouswithbooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although rooted in present world 2026, Glyph is a story of siblings- sisters Petra and Patricia. While grieving with the loss of their mother & battling an abusive father, they invent a game called Glyph - where they make up stories about communicating with ghosts
Estranged for many years, the sisters finally meet after the ghost of a blind horse from their childhood suddenly reappears in Petra's home one day
This book also shares many anecdotes about the horrors of war

Both the books Gliff and Glyph, explore sibling connection, loss of parent, use of horse as metaphor

I am not going to spoil it for you but the way in which Smith has hidden Gliff in the Glyph, she has played the ball out of the park
Reading the books in publication order shows how intelligently Smith has created this Möbius strip

Writing is extremely readable, laced with humor & characteristic Smith wordplays. I don't even remember the last time I laughed so much

Read it

[Joe Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mean, it's not that we weren't used to seeing the dead.

A story about stories, containing stories within stories, about stories, referencing other stories.

Less of a linear narrative than Gliff but equally as compelling. Happy to admit that I didn't fully understand everything going on, but that's the joy of an Ali Smith novel. So much to unpack and so many playful choices of language that I'm sure would benefit from a reread (and re-reread).

The stories-within-stories nature of the book reminded me quite a bit of House of Day, House of Night. Both excellent reads that are political and deal with memory in an impressively nuanced way.

Shame this is only going to be a duology. I'd be very happy to read a Gliph/Gleipgh/Glith?

[Jen · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 rounded up. Review to be posted closer to US publication date. Thought-provoking and funny with brilliant word-play. A solid "sequel" that blends politics and the personal and highlights the power of story-telling. I do love most of what Smith writes and had great fun reading this book - it will need multiple re-reads because so much is packed into a relatively short novel. More to come on the blog.

[Bram · Rating 5 out of 5]

Briljant zusterboek van Gliff.

[Jack Bigglestone · Rating 4 out of 5]

The endlessly inventive Ali Smith returns with the sister story to 2024’s strikingly allegorical Gliff. This time she’s brining the political back home to the closely personal. We again meet two siblings helping each other through a difficult childhood - in the shadow of their quietly abusive father and the death of their mother they use their bright, powerful imaginations to tell each other a story that might help them survive. But when does a story take on a life of its own, like a ghost (sometimes a very literal and loud ghost) that won’t leave us alone?

Glyph, like its smart and charming characters, is brimful of questions like these. How does global politics intersect and interrupt our everyday lives? How do we as individuals find agency in a deeply troubled and troubling world. With competing and confusing stories all around us how do we find what is honest and true, and avoid getting stuck in someone else’s version of the narrative? Smith’s genius is in wrapping these often complex ideas into a heartfelt story about normal people, and inviting every reader to think about them with her.

Smith’s simply powerful writing never lets me down, with its joyful exploration of what words can do and where ideas can lead us. She continues to be a guiding light of courage in bleak times, always hopeful that good people paying attention to the world can make a difference.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Then at some point in that future, Bill says, someone will find a way to make money out of that sediment. In which case -
In which case? Patricia says and smiles.
In which case the case of the stolen case will finally, at long last, be closed, Bill says.
A sedimental journey, Patricia says. There are some days, Billie Wild, especially days when I'm talking to you like this, it becomes clear as clearest air to me that family is never a closed case.
So, Bill says. Can I come? I mean - in case?

 
Ali Smith’s 14th novel.  
 
Her illustrious career has included prize wins for “Hotel World” (2002 RSL Encore Award for second novels), “The Accidental” (2005 Costa Novel Award), “There But For The” (2012 Hawthornden Prize), “How to Be Both” (which swept the spectrum of UK prizes from accessible to experimental (2014 Costa Award to 2014 Goldsmith Prize before also taking 2015 Women’s Prize 2015) and “Summer” last of her brilliant Seasonal Quartet (2021 Orwell Prize after “Winter” and “Spring” had been listed in previous years).  She has, somewhat like Beryl Bainbridge, been a perpetual Booker bridesmaid - four times shortlisted (2001 “Hotel World”, 2005 “The Accidental”, 2014 “How To Be Both” and 2017 “Autumn” before effectively withdrawing from the prize to focus on her writing). 
 
Her last two novels did not get any major prize recognition - “Companion Piece” (which as the name suggests felt like a coda to the quartet) and “Gliff” (which was made clear as the first of two paired novels - the second of which “Glyph” would tell a story hidden in the dystopian near future narrative of the first).  
 
And this now is this second novel – although at least on a first read (I have not revisited Gliff) the link is more that the novel “Gliff” itself is read by some of the characters in “Glyph”.  The three characters are two estranged sisters – Petra and the younger Patch (named aftet the first two Blue Peter dogs – mother and daughter) and Patch’s adopted teenage daughter Billie. 
 
Smith’s specialities are both fey and precocious activist children and we get both here
 
The first from Petra and Patch when they are younger and to pacify Patch after they are told a traumatic story (about a man flattened by a tank shortly before the end of WWII) Petra claims to be able to contact the dead.  Over time the two develop a sibling myth of Gliff – the man who was killed.   A second story that haunts them is from the first world war and a soldier shot for desertion after leading his gas-blinded horse away from the battlefield.  Later in the present day Petra calls Patch to help her after she finds a blind horse (who then disappears) frantically smashing up her bedroom.
 
The second from Billie – arrested for a passive role at a small pro-Palestinian action, passionate about the Gaza conflict and judgmental of her mother and aunt not jut for their smoking/drinking but for their concentration on two incidents from a war many decades ago when there are horrors into today’s world. Billie is also haunted by the death and mutilation of the Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna (whose removed vocal chords link to her Aunt’s job at a hearing clinic). She also has one of the best lines when being told by her elders that her generation is draconian “We have to be ……….. If You’re going to find yourself living in Draconia, best to speak some draconian.  Just so you know what the signposts say”.
 
Smith’s political engagement is an integral part of her work but too often does seem to be preaching to the converted and very black and white in its view of the world.  On one hand this works well – one of her key themes is that the very notion of objective truth has been blurred – but on the other hand I would say one of the biggest issues today is polarisation and echo chambers (left wingers decamping from X to BlueSky – however well intentioned has basically created two echo chambers) and Smith’s novels read like echo chambers.
 
(The evils of) AI is also a perhaps rather predictable theme of the novel – Patch having lost her job checking for the use of AI to (in the heavy handed irony for which Smith is known) an AI tool.
 
And alongside the irony we have the Smith trademark wordplay and punning – some of which I have to say falls well short of her best: an early riff on Stanchion is a particular low point.
 
There is also a lot of very deliberate metafictionality – firstly in the various characters discussion of Gliff, secondly in the way in which Billie alleges that the horse is actually a product of Petra’s imagination after reading Glyph, thirdly in the pages of the novel itself – for example a discussion of what it means to be a flat character and whether Petra and Patch are simply literary devices rather than rounded out characters (incidentally followed by perhaps the only really moving scene in the novel as Patch looks back to when she first met Billie as part of the adoption process.
 
A closing section covers two even older stories – the Greek myth of Tereus and Philomela and the various legends around St. Bartholomew – although we are reminded that for all his Sainthood and the miracles associated with him, his feast day was marked by an infamous French religious sectarian massacre.
 
Overall, I don’t think this is Smith’s finest work – the links between the not novels not working as well as the wonderfully interlaced Seasonal Quartet and the standalone experience falling short of “How To be Both” but she remains one of our foremost British novelists and I can see another Orwell Prize appearance.
 

[Eric Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ali Smith's writing has always been centred around the playfulness of language, its elasticity and surprising meanings. There is the mischievous way it alternately creates connections and misunderstandings between humans. Only Ali would conceive of a pair of novels whose titles are similar sounding words and each word has multiple definitions. “Glyph” is the second after her previous novel “Gliff”. Though there are some thematic links and both revel in the inventive glory of story telling, one of the strongest links between these books is how two characters have read the novel “Gliff” and disagree about its quality. Of course, Ali's two novel can be read independent of one another and it'd give a new meaning if you read them in an order separate to when they were published - like in her brilliant previous novel “How to Be Both” where the two sections can be read in different orders to give surprisingly different experiences.

This new book is filled with puns, the struggles of family life and the challenges of living in the world today (some of which are unique and others feel like the same old story felt through human history.) Adult sisters Petra and Patricia have been estranged for many years, but they had a strong connection to each other in childhood. They survived through living with an abusive father and the grief of losing their mother by conjuring or inventing the story of a special ghost. Now a certain spectre has made its presence felt in the present. This gives them the chance to reunite alongside Patricia's teen daughter Bill (Billie) who questions everything in a way which often unsettles adults. This novel is right up to date as it's set in 2026 and references many contemporary issues from debates over AI, whether flying certain flags is patriotic and waving other flags is criminal and the UK protests outside of asylum hotels. But it also looks back at history with stories of those who were lost in previous wars. There are individuals who resisted following the pack or simply showed their humanity by helping a disabled animal in need. Their voices were silenced by being executed by their fellow troops or they were literally flattened and left in the road. So many of these stories don't make it into the dominant narrative of history. In this novel they rise as spectres whose restlessness and indomitable spirits speak to the creative power of individuals.

There's an insightful passage in this book uttered by Bill which feels so relevant to what we're grappling with now: “there's this huge mechanism and it's acting on everybody. It is such a simple mechanism it is actually stealthy brilliance. You just say something that's the truth is a lie. Or that something that's a lie is the truth. Then the matter of something being true or not stops being about truth or lies and becomes about choosing a side and it drops itself like a blanket over everything, a blanket the size of the sky – no, maybe more like a net, like a gigantic fishing net, or the kind they use to drop over people on game shows on TV, something quite difficult to get untangled from so you have to struggle against it just to get yourself to the place where truth is.” I'm sure anyone who has been watching the news lately or feeling despair about the tone of current discourse can relate!

I was drawn to the lively personalities at the centre of this novel, but also some peripheral characters such as Glyph's longing for his lost lover and the sister's kindly uncle who was ignored at their mother's funeral. It takes real skill to make characters live on in a reader's imagination though only a slight bit of their experience is presented in the narrative. Smith is also brilliant at showing how though there may be tensions between relatives each family creates its own lexicon where words such as “stanchion” or “rubble” will take on their own meanings through being frequently used in their conversations. Most of all this book is a testament to the power of storytelling and how everyone will take their own meaning from those stories which are reinvented in their retelling - springing up like ghosts to tease, delight and provoke people to question the story about the world those in power want us to believe.


Read more of my reviews on my book blog LonesomeReader or check out the videos on my BookTube channel or consider joining my Bookclub

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was expecting to read a novel with multiple, seemingly unconnected, tangents and strands. This was the case.
I do enjoy Ali Smith’s punning (my favourite her was “stanchion” replacing ‘station’ and ‘stand by’ (Bowie’s Stanchion to Stanchion’(!!)), and I do enjoy the way in which Ali Smith writes dialogue. Her speciality is writing the exchanges between children, in this case Petra and Patch Wild. Girls in particular are definitely precocious in their worldliness and their wordplay. The horses portrayed in the book also provide a lovely, gentle and humane, counterpoint to the human craziness that’s in full evidence.
The early newspaper reviews have been broadly praising, and pick up on the speed, and the directness with which Ali Smith takes on and writes about real contemporary events; happening now. Gaza is mentioned by name only once in the book, but the horrors, and appalling normalcy, of the carnage pervades the book. Ali Smith writes about Gaza in such an understated, oblique way that it forces the reader to address the images and the reporting we are all aware of, rather than take on a verbatim, direct account from the author. In other words it’s the subtlety that gives the Gaza horror theme its force.
Then there’s the chaotic, disjointed, and often bonkers side observations that are spread through the book. Ali Smith never gives direct answers to questions that ask ‘what is this, or that, about', and so the interpretations will be as many as there are readers.

Ali Smith gets meta with her characters mildly disparaging, quizzical, remarks about the precursor to Glyph- Gliff which is referenced several times in this later novel. Patricia describes herself as a ‘flat character’.
What are the weirdest, most unfathomable, bits in the book? There's plenty to choose from. There are three endings. Each is as barmy, and seemingly left field as the other. Tinnitus and vocal chords get the Ali Smith treatment. Green shadows have meaning. Flowers and flattening go together.

Two reviews mirror my own response

Lucy Scholes”Smith’s back catalogue has earned her something of a free pass.. Where Glyph does excel is in Smith’s portrait of the relationship between the sisters”
John Self “Its hard to summarise the story because there are so many disparate elements that flower from nowhere”

I’m going to hear Ali Smith discuss the book later this week, during the launch tour. What I will be getting is anybody’s guess.

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding piece of literature. Even though the main characters –a couple of siblings as in Gliff– are not as emotionally attiring as in the previous novel, Smith succeeds amazingly well regarding the emotional charge of the work itself.

- ...that soreness has been going round and round the world since, like a bird looking for somewhere to land, and it has landed on me. p.32

In Gliff we became close and worried about a couple of kids in a dystopian world, and the homonymous horse most certainly symbolized the possibility of hope & goodness even in the darkest times. In Glyph, not only do we encounter an interesting metaliterary exercise where they are usually exhausting and self-absorbed, but we are told two incredibly touching stories about war, and how war takes place not only between nations but also against truth –in this case, the murder of a journalist.

I have a tense relationship towards literature that Smith resolves. I can't avoid despising intensely the mass market, the flood of pseudoliterature, the same old stories retold over and over that harm so much literature as an art. And for that, I'm usually much more inclined towards style rather than content. Yet Smith's work is exactly what a philosopher like Haraway would enjoy and courage: it matters what stories we tell each other, who tells them, with what intent, since it is through stories that we live by. And so, regarding story-telling Smith is one of the best. The topic of this book, I may have forgotten to tell, is our relationship with the dead: in what ways do they exist, do they still leave, in the sense that they affect us? By whom or what are we haunted, and what does it imply? As Joyce said, at the end of The Dead:

- his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent to their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I saw this novel, I was like, wait…what? Gliff and Glyph? What is Ali Smith up to? This novel isn’t a continuation of Gliff, but it’s not *not* a continuation of Gliff. It’s not linear, but it’s not *not* linear either. It’s dreamy and expansive and like reading a poem—you don’t always know where it’s going or what’s going on, you just sink into it and appreciate the beautiful writing.

Since it’s too early to quote any of my favorite passages from Glyph, I’m going to put my favorite passage from Gliff below:

“There was no such thing as AI children. You were either an alive one, or someone who’d once been a child and was now older, or a dead one; even if the children in the photo were advertising models – which did seem most likely the more I thought about it – then they were still children, or they’d been children once. Well, provided they weren’t invented by a computer collating thousands of digital images down into one single child then another and another, people who’d never existed.

Even so, even the thousands of fragments of images AI would use to make a non- existent child had to have come from children who’d been complete children once.

Where were they now? All of them, the maybe- real ones cupping their chins so happily here in the sun in the photo and all those ones whose images had been fragmented into digital splinters and borrowed and used to make up an aggregate image of a child who’d never existed. What were they doing in the world at this precise moment, the people these maybe- real children had become and the people the thousands of splintered borrowed children had become?”

Thanks so much to Knopf and NetGalley for providing me with a review copy!

Release date: May, 2026 🗓️

[Annie Waddoups · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two sisters, Petra and Patch, are bound by two war stories that frighten and intrigue them as young girls and bewitch them thereafter for years. The girls begin to imagine the tragic characters into life until they become a shorthand to intimacy, a common language to cope with their own tragedies. Years later now, the sisters are essentially estranged when the stories emerge again to connect them.

This feels, itself, like an allegory for our current age with undertow themes of war, honor, bravery, and sisterhood: a story about stories. Ali Smith writes with such immediacy and with a delightful ear for modern conversation and wit. Her prose and framing is unique and she trusts her readers to bring their own conclusions to the story. I haven't read the first of this series, though it didn't affect my enjoyment and I will now go find it. I loved her Season quartet and this hits the same mark.

On the power of story: "She could take something that was a dead weight in you, I mean in me, and could give it a story, a voice. And then that dead thing stopped. being a dead weight, it came alive, and because it did it started to carry itself. After that, whatever it was didn't seem so hopeless any more."

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glyph is presented as the partner novel to Gliff, but it's distance was a disappointment to me. Based on the marketing I assumed a closer connection to Gliff. It's there, and playfully prods at my disappointment in a very meta way.
The novel centres on Petra and her younger sister Patch. As children, they hear about a terrible event from the past and respond in the way children often do, by inventing a story. They create a ghost as a way of processing what they have learned.
Cut to today, Petra and Patch are estranged. Petra’s adult life is unsettled when a phantom horse appears. She understands immediately that this is something only Patch will know, and she reaches out to her sister, reopening old wounds and unfinished conversations.
On the surface, Glyph feels light, odd, and frequently strange... beneath that, darker themes emerge quietly and insistently. History. War. Genocide.The long shadows cast by the lunatics that control the world. Those ideas are thoughtful and clearly felt. Yet read after Gliff, the novel feels less striking, more pessimistic. It did not quite land with the same power as its companion.
3.5/5

[James B · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and Pantheon for the ebook. When Petra and Patch are young, they hear a horrific story about a soldier. Petra pretends to contact that soldier’s spirit to reassure her sister. Her sister tells her friends and then random neighbors start to appear, demanding that Petra contact their dead loved ones. All this comes to an end when real tragedy strikes their family. Thirty years later, the sisters are estranged when Petra seemingly has a blind horse in her bedroom, tearing it apart. A blind horse features in the story they were told so long ago. Patch runs to reunite with her sister, bringing her adopted daughter, Billie, along with her. A daughter who doesn’t live with old stories or ghosts from the past, but is wholly engaged in the ills that she and her generation see as what’s poisoning their country. A lovely book.

[Charlie Gill · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 Stars.

I found this far less compelling than Gliff, which sat on a far sterner foundation than Glyph. Within, the characters are far thinner realisations of siblings and family, and even a passing wink-nudge to it's predecessor felt slightly embarrassed.

Maybe I'm just Ali Smith-ed out from last year.

[Sharon Umbaugh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I adore Ali Smith and I loved Glyph! The magical realism elements charmed me and the relationship between the sisters is delightful, not to mention the amazing precision of the dialogue between the girls. I was enchanted reading the book and now I will circle back to Gliff #1.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

[Jessie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hadn’t read Gliff, so I worried that some parts might not make sense to me. However, the playful, lyrical writing between the sisters was absolutely gorgeous. The recurring motif of ghost stories shared between the girls broke my heart, beautifully capturing the innocence of young sisters coping with their mother’s terminal illness.

i loved it,

[Graham Sillars · Rating 5 out of 5]

I simply do not possess the vocabulary to describe how incredible this book, and, indeed, its predecessor, is.

Poetic, engaging, deeply affecting, devastating and profound.

There’s a playfulness here and at the same time a seriousness.

Please read this book if you are blessed with the opportunity to do so!

[Elena · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this far less compelling than Gliff, however I still enjoyed reading it and really appreciated the political commentary.

Whereas Gliff was set in a dystopian world in the near future, Glyph was anchored in the current world, but was equally as dystopian in nature.