How does Scottish author Ali Smith manage to offset despair with delight even in novels that tackle serious issues such as loss, grief, war, injustice, and insidious curtailments of freedom? The answer lies partly in her fervent belief in the life-enhancing powers of decency, human connection, and art, which underpins all her work.
Along with compassion and hope, she has brought clever structural innovations and verbal playfulness to ambitious projects like her masterful Seasonal Quartet, written during and about the stark days of Brexit and Covid, and How to Be Both, in which two narratives loosely connected by a Renaissance mural, but separated by centuries, can be read in either order.
Pulling off these literary feats with the extra challenges Smith sets for herself makes me think of the nimble dancer Ginger Rogers, about whom it's been said that she did everything Fred Astaire did, albeit backwards and in high heels. As a writer, Smith, too, is light on her feet.
Her latest literary challenge is a pair of novels published a year apart with confusingly similar titles — Gliff and Glyph. Bleakness dominates last year's Gliff, a chilling Orwellian dystopia about a cruel political regime that strips people of their rights and subjects these so-called "unverifiables" — including children -- to abuse. Newly published and tangentially related, Glyph restores Smith's usual balance between darkness and light. Both novels are thought-provoking, although somewhat less beguiling than her usual fare.
Gliff, the reader is told, is a Scottish vernacular term meaning to glimpse briefly or to be startled suddenly. Its homophone, glyph, means to carve, mark or engrave — as in petroglyphs. So one is temporary; the other, etched in stone, is more permanent.
Like much of Smith's work, both novels involve preternaturally wise children who lose their mother too young. Gliff features a brother and sister, aged 16 and 12, bravely trying to navigate the scary new world order on their own after their mother's disappearance. At the heart of Glyph are two sisters wrestling with the death of their young mum and the horrors of war, including the current situation in Gaza.
Before their mother's death, rock-solid Petra and Patricia "Patch" Wild hear a story about a WWII soldier whose body was flattened under a convoy of tanks in France and left to shrivel on the road. When Patch wakes with night terrors, her older sister, not wanting to disturb their ailing mother, tries to comfort her by pretending to be in contact with the unfortunate soldier's ghost, who assures Patch that he's alright. They dub this fantasy hero Glyph, as in hieroglyph -- because, flattened, he's two-dimensional, like a profile in an Egyptian frieze.
Like the Cleve sisters in the Winter volume of Seasonal Quartet, the Wild sisters' paths diverge in adulthood. But after years of estrangement and setbacks in their careers, they're reconnecting. Petra calls Patch to ask for help with a situation involving the ghost of a panicked horse that is wrecking her bedroom. The animal is connected to another horror story Petra heard as a child, about a WWI soldier who was executed for trying to save a horse that had been blinded by poisonous gas. For the record, ghosts — which are coming out of the woodwork in literature these days — also factor in Winter.
Patch, who as her name suggests, is good at patching things up, heads over to Petra's condo directly from the police station, where she has picked up the 16-year-old she's been fostering for years; Billie was arrested for purportedly waving a scarf "aggressively" at a demonstration in support of Gaza.
Reunited, the sisters talk and talk. Billie, who didn't even know Patricia had a sister, feels excluded. She can't get a word in edgewise, and is outraged that they're not more outraged by what's going on in the world. Their conversation, free of quotation marks or identifiers, is initially disorienting. But Patch's inveterate punning helps distinguish the speakers. Smith loves all the things language can do — including groaners like "sedimental journey," "horspitality," and, in reference to Patch's foster child, "Wild Bill Hiccup."
Among the subjects the sisters discuss is a dystopian novel that sounds a lot like Gliff. Patch had sent it to Petra despite her well-known preference for nonfiction. In what reads like a hilarious sendup of a Goodreads review, Petra deems it "A bit too dark for me. A bit too clever-clever, a bit too on the nose politically, for a novel. I'd have preferred a bit more world building. And what's with all that horse stuff? It could've been a bit more sci-fi. But yeah, I mean thanks for sending it."
Is it a bad thing for literature to be "too on the nose politically?" Patch wonders. Is it immoral and inauthentic to make up stuff about real people, as Billie argues? In Smith's highly topical Seasonal Quartet, characters ponder whether it's appropriate for an artist to portray their own times. What is suitable material for literature? And what's a writer to do in troubling times like these?
Ali Smith — bless her — refuses to shy away from current events and concerns, however sensitive.
Copyright 2026 NPR