Glyph

***THE NEW YORK TIMES* BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE • From a literary master, a novel of ghosts and history and family legacy, of the unexpected acts of care that shine light into our dark.**
*Ghosts don't exist.*
*They don't. End of.*
*Story, however.*
*It is haunting.*
*Everything tells it.*
It all starts when Petra and her little sister Patch hear a horrifying story from the past and find themselves making up a ghost.
Is it imaginary? Is it real?
Then it all starts again thirty years later when Petra, now estranged from Patch, finds a phantom horse kicking the furniture to pieces in her bedroom.
What to do? She phones her sister.
In a chiarascuro dance through our increasingly antagonistic era, *Glyph* asks if we’re attending to the history that’s made us and to the history we’re making.
A funny, warm and clear-eyed take on where we are now, *Glyph* is about what our imaginations are for and how, in a broken, brutal and divided time, we rekindle care, solidarity, resistance and openness. This anti-war novel, Ali Smith’s most soulful, playful and vital yet, is a work of lightness that goes deep to counter the forces currently flattening the modern world.