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Glyph

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Glyph

By: Ali Smith
Narrated by: Lesley Sharp
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

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 chiaroscuro 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.

A standalone novel, it’s family to Gliff (2024).

©2025 Ali Smith (P)2025 Penguin Audio

 Dystopian Family Life Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Science Fiction Women's Fiction Haunted Ghost Funny

Critic Reviews

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 (Keiran Goddard)
[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
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 now . . . Smith's portrait of the relationship between the sisters showcase her brilliant, inventive writing at its best, and I could have read pages more of the stuff. She writes their bond with the perfect amount of care, playfulness and love. I'm also beginning to think that she writes children better and more believably than anyone else; their freshness of perspective, curiosity and general intolerance for hogwash clearly align so intuitively with instincts of her own
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
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
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