In any story by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, you are likely to find a precocious young person who delivers a dose of naked truth, exposing the shams of contemporary mores and politics. You may also find a ghost. These figures often serve as catalysts. They shake other characters awake and chivy them along toward whatever small changes or revelations are possible within the scope of the story. They can be main characters, like the young narrator of Smith’s recent novel Gliff (2024), but more often they turn up unexpectedly, introducing a little wobble in the ongoing narrative, a shade of doubt.

Smith’s ghosts can be driven by the needs of their new, changed condition, as in her second novel, Hotel World (2001), or as transient and unassuming as the floating head of a Victorian child that visits an isolated woman in Winter (2017), a Dickensian touch for a Christmas novel. A ghost may resemble the human it once was, but not wholly. The afterlife strips something from us.

When a dead lover returns in Artful (2012), Smith’s collection of her four semifictional Weidenfeld lectures, she can barely speak or think. She is covered in debris, as if she’d been dropped through the walls of an old house, gathering the detritus of years. The lecture she appears in is called “On Time,” and like other Smith specters, she’s as much a manifestation of the past itself as of a specific person. The bereaved narrator accepts that this weird, grimy version of her lost love is not “real” as we typically understand the term:

I had to congratulate my imagination, for you were very like you. Though I’d never have imagined the imagination could be so good with smell; you smelt quite strong for something or someone imaginary. Either way, you’d come back, and it was about time.

Smith’s ghosts are rarely gloomy—or only intermittently. Death, where is thy sting if we get to hang around incorporeally for a while? They provide the ultimate narrative pivot: Surprise! Still here! And Smith offsets their metaphoric gravitas—their associations with loss, separation, and the riptide of time—with the comic potential of scaring the living or offering pert, disembodied opinions on art. Her ghosts reach back to folklore, but they are also creatures of our dark and boggy present, of our anxieties and disconnection. “I’ve a feeling I’ve inherited them from whatever Scottish literary family I belong to,” she said on the Canadian radio show Bookends.

Smith’s recent paired novels Gliff and Glyph (2026) both feature precocious young siblings. Glyph also has ghosts—and of a type new to Smith’s fiction. One human, one equine, they form what we might call “story ghosts,” the afterimages of powerful stories we can’t process or forget. They haunt as effectively as any jilted bride.

In Gliff, a dystopian novel set in a near-future Britain, two middle-school-aged children, Rose and Briar (Bri), are separated from their mother under mysterious circumstances and abandoned by their mother’s boyfriend, Leif, who may or may not have stolen their passports to sell. The family has been chased from its home by some government body that paints ominous red lines around buildings, cars, and people. Red-lined buildings are slated for demolition and redevelopment; “unverifiable” folk get carted off for reeducation. The hint to move on is unmissable.

In a last act of kindness, Leif brings the siblings to a new town and finds them a stripped nineteenth-century railway worker’s cottage to squat in until his promised return. From this home base, the older sibling, Bri—whose gender is never specified in the novel and who prefers not to be labeled—explores the town, while Rose discovers a group of horses, destined for the knacker, in a field nearby. She befriends a gray gelding and, having learned what the term “abattoir” means, convinces Bri to buy the horse with the last of their money. Rose names him Gliff, since she’d been warned the horse was “gliffy”—hard to handle. This magnificent creature must be concealed but cannot live inside their house for long. For help, they seek out other unverifiable people living secretly at a boarded-up school in town and discover there, among other wonders, a large library and some outmoded but functional computers.

Rose and Bri’s mother, an environmental whistleblower who lives almost as a fugitive, has kept her children away from new technologies and out of the public record. She considers smartphones a liability, not only because they can be tracked—state surveillance is a constant danger in Gliff—but because once you have one, “you see everything through it.” She would prefer her children to learn from the real world. She homeschooled them with her few books; as a result, the siblings share an uncommon knowledge of herbal healing.

Yet Bri is effortlessly “good with machines and tech.” Whenever they get near a laptop they revel in looking up words: “It was always exciting to me the number of things a single word could mean.” Online, then in the school library, they look up “gliff” and find almost two pages of definitions—an incantatory list (both real and fictional) that includes “to glimpse,” “to frighten,” and “to strike a glancing blow at someone or something.” They also try to decipher the Latin motto on the front of the school—Facta sunt ipse verba—marveling that

there was such a thing as a family of words, one that stretched across different languages all touching on each other, hitting or striking each other, acting on each other, influencing each other, agreeing with each other or throwing each other out, disturbing each other, doing all of these things at once.

Bri’s rapture recalls Virginia Woolf’s 1937 essay “Craftmanship,” a small section of which, taped for the BBC, constitutes the only surviving recording of her plummy Edwardian voice. (Its centering diphthongs, a feature now confined to a few well-heeled nonagenarians, make “survive” verge on three syllables.) Words, Woolf wrote in that essay, “are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things.” The difficulty in modern writing, she argued, is that old words are “so stored with meanings, with memories” that they are hard to combine with new words: they have already “contracted so many famous marriages.”

Smith’s characters frequently swoon over dictionaries, but Woolf would have disapproved: “Words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.” She resented the constraints (and exclusions) of the great institutions and their codifiers. Her father edited the Dictionary of National Biography and was an early reader for the Oxford English Dictionary: one reason why, to Woolf, a dictionary was a patriarchal rule book—and not even a complete or impartial one.¹

In compiling The Book Lover (2006), a collection of excerpts from some of her favorite and formative reading, Smith realized so many came from Woolf that “maybe this would have to be a Woolf anthology.” Aside from their feminism and stylistic affinities, they both write in service of books, libraries, and the freedom to read. Even Smith’s metaphors are often based on books and language; when a teenager, Magnus, falls in love with a charismatic interloper in her novel The Accidental (2005), he feels “she had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn’t known was in him.”

Smith loves to consider etymologies and their cultural implications. Almost all her novels include etymologies, which she uses as pivots—a way in, a way out, a thematic expansion—and as washes of unexpected color. In a 2025 interview with NPR, she was asked about an early job writing advertising copy for her brother’s business. Her memories of a biscuit jingle she came up with spark a meditation on the word “slogan”:

It’s connected to the English word slughorn, because it comes from a Gaelic word that sounds more like sluggern. And sluggern and slughorn meant a war cry. So slogans are directly descended from warfare and war cries—the noise that one tribe makes when it’s facing another and it blows its horn going [imitating horn blowing]. Buy Paterson Bronte Golden Crunch, the perfect fireside snack [imitating horn blowing]. Almost everything about slogans can be connected to the tribal in us, which is why they work so well.²

In Gliff it is hard not to see her brainy youths as self-portraits, especially when Bri rushes to share their list of definitions for “gliff” with Rose: “See, listen, you’ve actually called him something unpindownable. Something really excitingly polysemous…. Polysemous. I looked that word up too.” Not only Smith’s formal experiments but her constant wordplay, punning, and riffing give her prose a sense of superabundance, of endless, rapid-fire invention held back—sometimes belatedly—by her perception that she has taken her reader too far into the ether. Smith wrote her doctoral dissertation on the ordinary in modernist literature, so the balance between what Woolf called “granite and rainbow” (the solidity of “truth” or material reality and the insubstantial qualities of personality or emotion) has long been on her mind.³

Smith was born in Inverness in 1962, the youngest (by six years) of five children in a working-class family. Her father was an electrician and contractor with a gift for storytelling, and her mother helped in his shop. Neither parent was able to complete school, but they prized education for their children. The Smiths had only two artworks in the house, one a well-known print of bluebell woods that her mother could not resist and that her father thought a waste of money. When Smith evokes her mother’s ghost in a recent art catalog for the Munch Museum, So in the Spruce Forest (2025), she gives her a penetrating critical sensibility, restoring an art education she had never had:

Then the voice from nowhere carried on talking about Munch, like my mother of all people knew about Munch, like she knew I was looking at a picture right now, like she knew about the power crisis and the international unrest and the climate ruination in a world she’d left thirty years ago. Like she knew it all.

It was lovely to hear her voice again.

As a child Smith read her siblings’ schoolbooks and later realized she had absorbed much of the canon (Joyce, Orwell, Swift) before the age of ten. Almost as important were the two cinemas in town, one of which showed foreign films on weekends. When Smith digresses in her fiction, she often writes about representation, about how stories and films work; near the middle of The Accidental is a two-page tour de force on cinema, a floating first-person account of the filmic formation of some collective, unnamed narrator whose experiences are shared almost universally. “My mother was a nun who could no longer stand the convent,” we learn.

She married my father, the captain; he was very strict. She taught us all to sing and made us new clothes out of curtains….

When I was a child I ran the Grand National on my horse. They didn’t know I was a girl until I fainted and they unbuttoned my jockey shirt.

Glyph, for its part, pulls in many of the narrative beats from Laurel and Hardy’s Wrong Again (1929), in which the hapless duo brings a horse inside.

Smith studied English at the University of Aberdeen and went on to Newnham College, Cambridge, for a Ph.D. There she met her future partner, Sarah Wood—a filmmaker and artist and Smith’s frequent collaborator—when Wood directed a play of hers. Smith taught English and American literature for eighteen months at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, but she felt alienated by the changes occurring in academia, including the recasting of universities as businesses. She developed chronic fatigue syndrome at twenty-seven and took months to recover. As she later put it, “I had to stop so that I could decide which road to cross.” She returned to Cambridge, where she wrote the stories in her first book, Free Love and Other Stories (1995), which won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award.

Her debut novel, Like, followed two years later. Like’s autobiographical elements include aspects of the class divide and the unequal relationship between Scotland and England. Smith introduces some of the doubling and layering that build in her later work. Timelines weave. Fire is a recurrent theme; one of the main characters goes by Ash, short for Aisling. In retrospect, the novel is also about the closet, about the displacement and destruction that result when two girls can’t just love each other.

Four of Smith’s novels have been short-listed for the Booker, but her most celebrated book is probably How to Be Both (2014), her sixth novel, composed of two separate but interconnected narratives set five hundred years apart. It was published in two versions, each beginning with one of those narratives. (Smith’s publisher split the print run in half; the covers were identical.) One part of How to Be Both features a dead narrator, the Quattrocento painter Francesco del Cossa (secretly a cross-dressing girl in this novel), who finds himself “shot back into being like an arrow [to] find myself now in this intermediate place.” Cossa really existed but left almost no biographical record—a perfect opportunity to invent one. The other part is a contemporary story in which a woman drags her adolescent daughter to Ferrara to see the enchanting frescoes Cossa painted with Cosmè Tura at the Palazzo Schifanoia (the Palace of Escape from Boredom).

Smith’s work takes a darker turn after How to Be Both, reflecting the political turmoil of the past ten years, especially the refugee crisis, climate change, and new legal restrictions on free expression and street protest. Her seasonal quartet, which begins with Autumn (2016) and ends with Summer (2020), is both a love letter to nature and art and a counterpunch to the rise of the far right.⁴ She intended the quartet to be about longevity, she said in an interview with The Paris Review, “and, at the same time, about the surface of whatever was happening in the world at the time the book was being written.”

They do function as state-of-Britain novels, though their sociopolitical concerns will feel familiar across the globe. Also familiar are the stupid bureaucratic snarls that arise from tighter regulations (at the bank, at the post office, at the passport bureau), the sense of everything getting worse and harder, and of our collective exhaustion at constant loss, shock, and forced adjustment. When a character in Spring (2019) visits his dying friend, he asks, “How’re you doing, apart from the end of liberal capitalist democracy?” Spring could serve as a sister novel to Gliff, with its gifted young person—this one a bit magical, to suit the season—and its underground network of rescuers, its stubborn assertion that kindness can still change the world.

Gliff, which won the 2026 Dublin Literary Award, began as a short story commissioned for an anthology of Kafka-inspired fiction, A Cage Went in Search of a Bird (2024). That story, “Art Hotel,” unseated the novel Smith had been working on and, lightly edited, became the opening chapters of Gliff. The bureaucratic menace of Kafka’s 1925 The Trial looms over the unverifiables of the novel, but its presiding spirit is Orwell, who would recognize the double life Bri constructs as the plot develops: a sliver of authenticity and remembered happiness sealed off from their outward conformity to an authoritarian system. In that hidden self lies Bri’s tenacious bond with Rose, long after circumstances drive Rose and Gliff away from her.

It sounds flip to describe Gliff as Smith’s glyphosate novel, but her wordplay in the homophone titles Gliff and Glyph is intentional. In between the publications of the two novels, the UK license for glyphosate, the chemical used in herbicides like Roundup, was extended until mid-December 2026, although its toxicity and environmental dangers are well documented.⁵ While pregnant with Rose, Bri’s mother had written public relations copy for the weed killer conglomerate Kindweed, trying to convince buyers of its safety. She tells Bri that a former employee, a chemist, confided that the weed killer “didn’t just poison weeds and grasses and flowers and insects, but was also unsafe for lots of other bigger living things. Including dogs, and birds, and cows, and the milk that came from them.” And horses, we assume, as well as humans, especially children and developing fetuses. The product marketed as Kindweed’s gentlest is secretly the same as the company’s most virulent. When Bri’s mother began quietly asking questions, she was sacked.

The relationship between Gliff and Glyph is like a set of mirrors installed at irregular angles, the last of which reflects something outside. Themes are repeated, including the sibling bond. Other correspondences flash and fade. The news is ominous and true to life—AI takeover, economic collapse—but Glyph has a tonal shift, a puckish quality that feels more characteristic of Smith’s earlier fiction than Gliff does. The plot centers on two middle-aged sisters, Petra and Patricia (“Patch”) Wild, who have barely spoken after the bruising experience of sorting their dead parents’ possessions eight years earlier. They shared a tense childhood; after their loving mother died young, their father, prone to outbursts, withdrew into angry silence when not punishing Petra, the elder of the two. A few pages into Glyph, we learn that Gliff is a speculative dystopian novel that Patch has sent Petra as an olive branch. Patch’s foster daughter, Billie, had been reading it, “phone usually glued to the hand but for three whole days it was nothing but a book.”

What really caught Patch’s eye was the title. When the sisters were young, not long before their mother died, Petra invented a ghost—or rather, pretended to contact one in order to comfort Patch. The girls had heard a real-life horror story from World War II about a corpse found flattened on a road in France, as if run over and over by a convoy of tanks, and Patch couldn’t sleep afterward. Petra pretends to ring up the flattened man, who is fine in the afterlife: “He said that he doesn’t really like being reminded of what happened to him but that you thinking of him had made him very moved and pleased.” They were both, Petra suggests, “to go to sleep now and wake up tomorrow free from worry.” Patch believes and disbelieves in this phone call with the dead. But the ghost, instead of remaining a onetime “jeu d’esprit,” as Petra’s worried mother calls him, sticks around, becoming real enough to name. They call him “Glyph.”

Once Gliff stirs the memory of their ghost, Petra feels a surge of guilt, the clear

wrongness in what we were doing, using a terrible true story, the ghost or the shade of a story, about something abysmal that I’m assuming really did happen to someone real, to distract ourselves from feeling what we must no doubt have been feeling, and sensing, round what turned out to be—and look at me now even in this sentence still keeping it at a distance—our mother’s impending death.

As the only redress she can imagine, she launches an extensive online search to try to find anything “real and true” about the dead man. But her thoughts are interrupted by bouts of clattering noise in her house, as if her neighbor were throwing furniture. And what is that smell? She finally throws open a door to find a spectral horse tearing apart her bedroom. Petra’s first call is to Patch, to lay a ghost (or two) to rest and try to mend their estrangement.

The wartime story at the heart of Glyph originates with the writer Xandra Bingley, Smith’s former agent. A member of Bingley’s family had encountered the flattened corpse on a road in the south of France near the end of the war. “Someone tells you something and it goes into you like osmosis,” Smith told an interviewer on the BBC radio show Take Four Books. “And I have not been able to stop thinking about this for a long time.” She had the story in mind while writing Gliff, but she “couldn’t actually face it. I couldn’t get near it. I couldn’t get to the kind of horrific quality of the removal of dimension from the human being. I couldn’t get near it until…I’d written the first book.”

In Glyph, Petra watches what seems like Gaza coverage on television while completing a Duolingo lesson on her phone. Increasingly, in Smith’s work, technology has been tied to the question of witnessing and to our increasing numbness to suffering. A character in Winter realizes she “had been feeling nothing for some time now. Refugees in the sea. Children in ambulances. Blood-soaked men running to hospitals or away from burning hospitals carrying blood-covered children.” In How to Be Both, a teenager is traumatized by accidentally clicking on a website displaying a child rape. She vows never to turn away from abuse, never to choose anesthesia.

In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag argued that visual depictions of suffering could diminish lived experience and risked becoming mere aesthetic objects, especially if displayed in a gallery or museum. Private viewing might preserve the emotional effect, she thought. She could not have foretold the bovine trance in which we scroll past hundreds of images a day on our own tiny screens.

Many of Smith’s novels have addressed the rise of consumer technologies. As early as There but for the (2011), she brilliantly described Google search as a “whole new way of feeling lonely,” with its

semblance of plenitude but really a new level of Dante’s inferno, a zombie-filled cemetery of spurious clues, beauty, pathos, pain, the faces of puppies, women and men from all over the world tied up and wanked over in site after site, a great sea of hidden shallows.

Terrible things also happen to books in Smith’s work. For a writer so fiercely supportive of public libraries and so dreamily susceptible to what the diarist W.N.P. Barbellion called the “almost audible susurrus of desire—the desire every book has to be taken down and read,” Smith seems to enjoy mangling them. One character in an early story tears out the pages of her books one by one as she finishes reading them. Like ends with a shocking conflagration, though books are punished throughout, perhaps made to bear their young writer’s anxieties of authorship. Or it may be that familiarity does breed contempt—or at least overwhelm, as those with book heaps can attest. At a bookstore event to promote So in the Spruce Forest, Wood and Smith described leaving a book outside to see how the elements worked on it.⁶ They think it was The Tempest.

Smith is gentler to books in Gliff and Glyph, however, as if they are friends down on their luck. In Glyph, a book reconnects estranged siblings—a reminder of a shared literary culture we used to idealize (like a tidal island, not always reachable from the mainland). And in Gliff, with its wondrously preserved school library, we revisit the mind-expanding potential of books, the radical freedom they embody as freedom recedes elsewhere: “Wherever my eye went, books. Oh! I said.”