14 January 2026

Ali Smith’s infectious hope

For two pairs of sisters in her new novel Glyph, storytelling is a way of dealing with troubles past and present

Photo by Zoe Childerley/ Millennium Images

Ali Smith loves echoes, doubles, reverberations. The sisters in Glyph, Petra and Patricia, have been reading Smith’s previous novel Gliff, a book set in a dystopian near-future characterised by state surveillance and climate catastrophe. Gliff’s story of siblings rescuing a mysterious horse brings back the world of jubilant but desperate storytelling that took over the lives of the sisters as children when their mother was dying. Two stories from the world wars preoccupied them then and return now: one about a blind horse rescued by a deserting comrade-at-arms of their great grandfather’s; another about a flattened man, Glyph, they used to pretend to converse with.

Thus the two novels mirror and imperfectly complete each other. If Gliff warned of a disastrous near future, Glyph is set in a near-disastrous present. As in Smith’s epoch-defining seasonal novels, it tells us familiar recent news but tries to change our attitudes towards it with a mixture of direct exhortation and proliferating revisions. Patricia’s 16-year-old adopted daughter Billie is protesting on behalf of Palestine Action and she’s haunted by the Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, whose eyes, tongue, brain and larynx were removed by the Russians in 2024.

Most readers will share Smith’s views on the climate crisis, war, genocide and surveillance, and by now we certainly know hers, so this material can feel predictable. But Smith remains an exceptionally gifted storyteller, able to do in two pages what other novelists cannot manage in ten. Still, her brief snapshots are not always enough, and I miss the more sustained development of character and story found in earlier masterpieces such as The Accidental or How to Be Both.

She has answers to all this, with Patricia describing herself – with some pride – as a “flat character”. Some of my objections are aired in the mother-and-daughter conversations about Gliff. “I found it a little blatant,” Patricia says. “You want it to meet your needs,” Billie replies dismissively, arguing that it has to be politically blatant because things like this “are blatantly happening in reality to real people”. This does not satisfy. If more novelists followed this logic, we would end up with a great many boring books – and Smith’s are never boring. 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 – or a “gliff”, which the siblings define as a sliver of anything from time to illness to smell. The problem here, however, is that because the underlying thinking remains conventional, the wordplay and plotting can become skittish and frantic, as Smith works to shore up the book’s originality.

Still, 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. Both sets of siblings become estranged, but then are brought together by horse stories from their past. In Glyph, reading Gliff seems to prompt Petra to summon the ghost of the blind horse, who appears in her London flat and messes up her bedroom. Petra then summons Patricia, who comes with Billie to tidy up her estranged sister’s bedroom, but also to reanimate her life.

What Petra requires seems to be some kind of shared soaking in their shared past – a return to the stories she once had such a gift for but whose power she came to fear. Billie is rightly sceptical of family, thinking that “family almost always means someone somewhere doesn’t get to be it”. But the enigmatic yet compelling loyalty between Petra and Patricia parallel the bursts of affinity she’s feeling with Roshchyna. It begins to feel as though bonds of any kind can become metonyms for larger possibilities. If a blind horse is worth laying down your life for, then all kinds of sacrifice become possible – and even necessary – because, as the girls’ mother once says, “even when things are pretty dire, there’s… always a choice we can make to make them a bit less dire”. 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.

Glyph
Ali Smith
Hamish Hamilton, 288pp, £20