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 chiaroscuro 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.

A standalone novel, it’s family to Gliff (2024).

Once upon a time, not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint round the outside of their house . . .

So begins the freewheeling and urgent new novel from Ali Smith – the story of two young people and a horse called Gliff, on the run from history as it takes a turn for the worse.

‘A voice that moves with lightness and precision, where bravery and goodness triumph in spirit over jeopardy and fear’ Financial Times

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE

Once upon a time not very far from now, two children come home to find a line of wet red paint encircling the outside of their house.

What does it mean?

It’s a truism of our time that it’ll be the next generation who’ll sort out our increasingly toxic world.

What would that actually be like?

In a state turned hostile, a world of insiders and outsiders, what things of the past can sustain them and what shape can resistance take?

And what’s a horse got to do with any of this?

Gliff is a novel about how we make meaning and how we are made meaningless. With a nod to the traditions of dystopian fiction, a glance at the Kafkaesque, and a new take on the notion of classic, it’s a moving and electrifying read, a vital and prescient tale of the versatility and variety deep-rooted in language, in nature and in human nature.

‘As always, Ali’s inventiveness and intelligence lit fireworks in my mind. Gliff is an irresistible invitation to rethink and reword our way to a truly brave new world’ Michelle de Kretser

The unmissable new work from Ali Smith, following the dazzling Man Booker-shortlisted Seasonal quartet

One day in post-Brexit, mid-pandemic Britain, artist Sandy Gray receives an unexpected phone call from university acquaintance Martina Pelf. Martina is calling Sandy to ask for help with a mysterious question she’s been left with after she’s spent half a day locked in a room by border control officials for no reason she can fathom:

‘Curlew or curfew? You choose.’

And what’s any of this got to do with the story of a young and talented blacksmith hounded from her trade and her home more than five hundred years ago?

Ali Smith’s novel takes wing, soaring between our atomised present and our medieval past in the hope we can open our locked down homes and selves to all the other times, other species, other histories, other possibilities.

‘[An] entertaining and expert portrayal of the world we live in, seen by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences’ Telegraph

‘[Companion piece] makes you look at the world afresh. For me, it turned a cold and depressing day into a bright one’ New Statesman

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2022

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HIGHLAND BOOK PRIZE 2022

‘A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.’

Here we are in extraordinary times.
Is this history?

What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other?
What have we lost?
What stays with us?
What does it take to unlock our future?

Following her astonishing quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms.

‘Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.’

LONGLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE 2022

Praise for the Seasonal Quartet

A ONCE IN A GENERATION SERIES

‘State-of-the-nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us’ New Statesman

‘Ali Smith is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now’ Observer

‘A book to savour, a literary tour de force that captures the nation’s psyche exquisitely’ Evening Standard on Summer

Summer won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, 2021

Autumn was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, 2017

Summer was a Sunday Times Number 1 bestseller

A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now.

‘Her best yet, a dazzling hymn to hope, uniting the past and present with a chorus of voices’ Observer

What unites Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, Shakespeare, Rilke, Beethoven, Brexit, the present, the past, the north, the south, the east, the west, a man mourning lost times, a woman trapped in modern times?

Spring. The great connective.

With an eye to the migrancy of story over time, and riffing on Pericles, one of Shakespeare’s most resistant and rollicking works, Ali Smith tells the impossible tale of an impossible time. In a time of walls and lockdown Smith opens the door.

The time we’re living in is changing nature. Will it change the nature of story?

Hope springs eternal.

Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith’s new novel, Companion piece, is available now.

*****

‘An astonishing accomplishment and a book for all seasons’ Independent

‘Smith is a masterful storyteller . . . Savour it’ Evening Standard

‘Infectious in its energy and warmth’ Daily Telegraph

Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer’s leaves? Dead litter.

The world shrinks; the sap sinks.
But winter makes things visible. And if there’s ice, there’ll be fire.

In Ali Smith’s Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter.

It’s the season that teaches us survival.

Here comes Winter.

Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith’s new novel, Companion piece, is available to pre-order now.

*****

‘Dazzling . . . Even in the bleak midwinter, Smith is evergreen’ Daily Telegraph

‘Graceful, mischievous, joyful . . . Infused with some much-needed humour, happiness and hope’ Independent

‘A novel of great ferocity, tenderness and generosity of spirit . . . Luminously beautiful’ Observer

A Book of the Year according to: the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Evening Standard, The Times.

‘Dazzling’ Daily Telegraph

Winter? Bleak. Frosty wind, earth as iron, water as stone, so the old song goes. The shortest days, the longest nights. The trees are bare and shivering. The summer’s leaves? Dead litter.

The world shrinks; the sap sinks.
But winter makes things visible. And if there’s ice, there’ll be fire.

In Ali Smith’s Winter, lifeforce matches up to the toughest of the seasons. In this second novel in her acclaimed Seasonal cycle, the follow-up to her sensational Autumn, Smith’s shape-shifting quartet of novels casts a merry eye over a bleak post-truth era with a story rooted in history, memory and warmth, its taproot deep in the evergreens: art, love, laughter.

It’s the season that teaches us survival.
Here comes Winter.

A once-in-a-generation series, Ali Smith’s Seasonal quartet is a tour-de-force about love, time, art, politics, and how we live now.

‘Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting’ The Times

Daniel is a century old. Elisabeth, born in 1984, has her eye on the future. The United Kingdom is in pieces, divided by a historic once-in-a-generation summer.

Love is won, love is lost. Hope is hand in hand with hopelessness. The seasons roll round, as ever . . .

Discover all four instalments: Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer. Ali Smith’s new novel, Companion piece, is available now.

*****

ONE OF THE GUARDIAN’S BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURY

‘Undoubtedly Smith at her best. Puckish, yet elegant; angry, but comforting’ The Times

‘Bold and brilliant’ Observer

‘Terrific, extraordinary, playful . . . There is an awful lot to lift the soul’ Daily Mail