I mentioned in my Ghost Town review that I’d followed that novel up with another ghost story – Ali Smith’s Glyph ( Pantheon Books 2026 – thanks to the publisher for the ARC). Glyph released last week and is the sequel-not-sequel to the 2024 Gliff. I’d say it’s more of a companion – each book can be read as a standalone, but you will get so much more out of Glyph if you’ve read Gliff first. I’m not providing any quotes because I don’t have the finished version to compare, not because it’s not quotable; Smith is insanely quotable.
I absolutely loved Gliff and I absolutely love how Smith incorporated Gliff into Glyph by making it a book that the two main characters and a very strong secondary character (Petra, Patch, and Bill) have all read. I particularly enjoyed the discussion of the ending of Gliff and how Glyph gives us the siblings reuniting. The novels bleed in and out of each other, the two pairs of siblings echoing each other in an imaginative approach to storytelling, imagination, and the narratives we choose to tell that I won’t soon forget.
Smith’s writing is charming and cheeky; it has a bit of sting with a lot of heart, and I can’t recommend this duology enough.
A Girl Named Tommi 