Old Bastards
Stevie Duffy
INDIE SCOTTISH BOOKSELLER
In stock
Author: Ali Smith
£19.95
Glyph follows sisters Petra and Patch whose childhood invention of a ghost resurfaces decades later when strange events force them to confront the stories that shaped them. Blending memory, imagination and political reflection, it explores how history echoes through the present. For readers of inventive literary fiction concerned with language, memory and contemporary society.
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Smith uses ghosts, memory and family to ask serious questions about the present, creating a novel that is both intimate and politically alert.
As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.
Ghosts do not exist. Petra insists on it, even as everything around her feels haunted. The story begins when she and her little sister, Patch, hear a horrifying tale from the past and find themselves making up a ghost. What they conjure sits uneasily between imagination and reality, and the question of what is real does not loosen its hold.
Thirty years later it begins again. Petra and Patch are estranged now, and Petra finds a phantom horse in her bedroom, kicking the furniture to pieces. She does the only thing she can think to do. She phones her sister.
Moving in a chiaroscuro dance through an increasingly antagonistic era, Glyph asks how we attend to the history that has made us, and to the history we are making. It turns to what imagination is for, and to what might be rekindled in a broken, brutal, divided time: care, solidarity, resistance, openness. A standalone novel, it is family to Gliff.
Modern Literary Fiction
Books in Glasgow
The Young Team
Graeme Armstrong
£9.95