Glyph

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 * Guardian *
[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 *
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 * Financial Times *
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 * Observer, '2026 Look Ahead' *
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 * i Paper *
This feels like one of Smith’s most vital novels – restless, tender, angry, and alive to contradiction . . . What makes Glyph so compelling is its tonal confidence. It's funny without being flippant, political without being sanctimonious * Irish Independent *
Melding history with today's headlines, Glyph is invigoratingly political * Daily Mail *
This story of sisters blends experimental touches with a warm, playful approach * The Times *
The pleasures of Ali Smith's work stem from its application of an essentially modernist sensibility to up-to-the-minute subject matter, a combination that has made her the only writer to have won both the Goldsmiths prize (awarded to "fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form") and the Orwell prize (awarded to "novels or collections of stories that illuminate major social or political themes"). Smith delights in puns, allusions and formal experiment; she also has a strong social conscience. She pitches the freedoms of art against the strictures of our current moment and shows that, in the right hands, art can be more than equal to the challenge * Times Literary Supplement *
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 *