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

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

[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

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

Vital . . . Smith’s genius lies in her ability to wrap these huge, knotted ideas inside a tender, human story . . . Powerful, playful with language, fearless with thought, and always alert to what’s possible

Buzz Magazine

Glyph follows on from Ali Smith's 2024 novel, Gliff, which tells a story hidden in the first. The less you know about it the better as you immerse yourself back into Smith's world

Radio Times

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

Melding history with today's headlines, Glyph is invigoratingly political

Daily Mail

Refreshing, interested and relevant . . . Literary modernism meets your not-so-typical ghost story in Ali Smith’s Glyph. Battling against typical stream-of-consciousness techniques, Smith proves she caninnovate in this new game of spirits . . . Any fan of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce or Jack Kerouac will enjoy Smith’s assimilation of small factual details from history into a spectre for modern times . . . Smith seems confident in tackling traditional writing formats, plot-based structures and common phraseology but avoids churning out incomprehensible semiotic gloop. It’s a surprising recipe for thoughtful enjoyment if you want to pick up a book on any afternoon

The Indiependent

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

A companion piece to Gliff from last year, Ali Smith will return with Glyph later this month. One of the books Scotsman critic Stuart Kelly is looking forward to the most in 2026, this anti-war novel questions where we are now in our divided times

The Scotsman, '2026 Look Ahead'

A playful and political tale of two sisters

New Statesman, '2026 Look Ahead'

I find [Ali Smith's] writing so emotional and powerful, as well as really funny in its playfulness and liveliness and through its connections between disparate individuals, especially amongst different generations and I just can’t wait to read this new book

Eric Karl Anderson, 'My Most Anticipated Books of 2026'

Ali Smith’s Glyph is a companion to 2024’s Gliff, and promises to tell a story initially hidden in that previous novel. Expect fables, siblings, phantoms and horses in a typically playful shout of resistance against war, genocide and the increasingly hostile social discourse

Guardian, '2026 Look Ahead'

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