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Ali Smith: Glyph
Our two main characters are two sisters. The eldest, Petra, is the narrator. Her younger sister is called Patricia but is always known as Patch.
We start with two stories from the war. The first has been passed down through the family from the great grandfather and concerns tWW1. A soldier sees that a horse has been blinded by mustard gas and is likely to be shot. He removes his military clothes and takes the horse away. We do not know w till much later in the book what happened to the horse, but we do know that the soldier was arrested and shot.
The second story comes from an elderly lady who they think might be some sort of aunt and is called Edie. Towards the end of World War II, she was in France carrying some confidential papers. She came across the body of someone which looked very squashed. It looked as though it had been run over by a tank or something similar and was completely flat. She wants to try and scrape it up, but she has an urgent mission and hurries on. The story leaves a profound impression on the girls.
Gradually, the dead body becomes a character, a sort of imaginary friend conjured up by Petra and who she claims is there, though invisible, and becomes something of a fixture. He is called Glyph.The situation becomes more complicated when Patricia mentions it to a friend and the friend wants to commune with a dead dog. The word gets around that there is someone who can communicate with the dead and the family is besieged by people seeking such contact. Not surprisingly the parents. are not amused. Their y mother is sickly. and will die at the age of 38. Their father is an abusive man and he is furious. However, the flattened man very much remains a part of the life of the two girls. Petra becomes increasingly inventive about him inventing things about his appearance, and his life. For example he seems to be bisexual and even has a rich boyfriend who goes off to the war.
W When they grow up, they become somewhat estranged and go their own ways. When their father finally dies, they struggle over who gets what and essentially do not see one other after that or some considerable time.
They are now well and truly adults and Petra has had a good job in the clothing business, but the company went bust and she is out of a job. She does not have a partner or a husband, though she did have a female partner earlier on. Patricia, however, has been married and has a daughter called Billie but known as Bill. Patricia has found her daughter reading a book calledGliff which is the title of Smith’s previous work. The connection between the two books seems to be limited to the fact that both involve two sisters.
Billie is something of a rebel and, indeed, she gets arrested or waving her scarf which seems to have some connection with a prohibited organisation, and is clearly a a reference to Palestine Action, an organisation banned in tithe UK as a terrorist organisation and which received substantial ssupport, particularly from older people.
After this episode at Patricia decides to visit her sister who has called for help and Bill is surprised to learn that she has an aunt and claims to be unaware of the aunt’s existence.
Meanwhile, Petra has taken advantage of modern technology to investigate the story of both the flattened man and the man who was shot for leading then blind horse away. She finds a lot on the second subject but relatively little on the first. She also tries to trace Edie but without success.
Patricia and Bill are now heading to London to meet Petra who has summoned Patricia because she has a problem. We know what the problem is – she has found a horse in her bedroom. Yes, a real live kicking horse .Did she conjure it up from her investigations into the horse from World War I? Meanwhile, en route to London, Bill is learning a lot about her unknown aunt.
Patricia and Bill arrive and Patricia and Petra seem to be close again. However, there is clearly a generation gap between Bill on the one hand and her mother and aunt on the other hand, on a variety of issues ranging from smoking to the Glyph story. Ghosts you’ve made up rubbish about from wars that were finished over a hundred fucking years ago?
Stuck in some fictional limbo. Both of you. Like it’s in any way relevant to anything real, Bill says. Bill is more interested in real stories such as the woman Ukrainian journalist who is captured, tortured and killed by the Russians.
The reference to the Ukraine war is just one of many contemporary issues that hat are mentioned with thers including, inevitably AI, pesticides (glyphophosphate ln reference to glyph), the opposition to asylum seekers in the UK and other topical subjects.
To a great extent this book is about stories. All the characters mention stories that have been important and of course the eponymous Glyph the story is key. But we are treated to other stories, some of which are clearly true, some of which are fictitious and some of which straddle boundaries between truth and fiction. All of these. link in some way to the main themes, which include, amongst others a horrors of the world. We get stories from the past as well as from the present showing us the world is all too often not a happy place.
As always, Ali Smith produces a s superb novel which not only keeps us gripped but which shows us, as she has done in her other books, a Britain and a world life which is not generally smooth and happy.
Publishing history
First published in 2026 by Random House