Ali Smith’s Glyph is the companion novel to her earlier novel, Gliff (2024). Gliff was set in a surreal near-future dystopia. Glyph, meanwhile, is set in the present. But like Smith’s earlier Seasonal Quartet, it offers the reader an uncanny version of our world, haunted by ghostly voices from the past.
The novel focuses on two sisters, Petra and Patricia (aka Patch). The action moves between scenes from their childhood in the 1990s and their present-day estrangement.
