GLYPH

Two sisters are curiously imprinted by childhood memories of death and loss.

As the title suggests, this novel is a kind of companion piece to Smith’s previous novel, Gliff (2025), which also concerns a pair of siblings, a horse, and a suggestion that we haven’t learned our lessons from history. Here, the two main characters are Petra and Patricia (aka Patch), sisters in England who are generally earthbound and well-read. (Indeed, they’ve commiserated over Gliff, which Petra found “a bit too clever-clever.”) Petra is dwelling on a handful of childhood memories. In one, her great-grandfather was said to have euthanized a gas-blinded horse during World War I; in another, a visitor shared a story about a man who was literally flattened during World War II; in a third, she recalls a brief period when she jokingly pretended to be able to speak to the dead, until locals began taking her seriously. These bleak memories prompt a spasm of dissociation for Petra, if not a psychotic break; soon the novel, Gliff, and the history blend in her mind to the point that she sees a horse on the loose in her bedroom. Patch arrives to sort out matters, with her teenage daughter, Bill (aka Billie), in tow. As ever, Smith embraces angular, fragmented storytelling along with slippery and allegorical messaging, though her characterizations are lively and crystal clear. Petra and Patch, who split narration duties, are both sharp-witted and engaging women knocked sideways by their disrupted sense of reality, while Bill is a whip-smart, politically engaged foil dragging them into the present. (She’s in trouble at school for waving a scarf; details are scarce but the suggestion is that it was a pro-Palestinian gesture.) Smith is indirect about it, but the implication of all this—forgetting, memory, war dead—is that our brutal pasts are hard to shake.

An abstract and mordant meditation on the long aftereffects of violence.