Glyph focuses primarily on two sisters: Petra, the elder, and Patricia (or ‘Patch’). The novel is set in (roughly) the present day, but flashes back to look at the sisters’ childhood in the 1990s. At a family party, an elderly relative tells the story of seeing a man utterly flattened by tanks in France in the Second World War. The sisters create an imaginary friend from the unknown man, and name him ‘Glyph’. This story, and another war tale of a man in the First World War who was executed for desertion (following his unwillingness to put down a blind horse), continue to the haunt the sisters in the present day. Petra is still searching for details of the flattened man, and calls Patricia for help following years of estrangement after she believes she sees the ‘ghost’ of the blind horse in her bedroom, which (by whatever means) has been trashed.

The Book of Form of Emptiness centres on Benny Oh, a young Canadian adolescent who has recently lost his father, the Korean-Japanese jazz musician Kenji, and now lives with his mother Annabelle. It is told by turns from the persepectives of a book (“the book”) and Benny himself, who debates with the seemingly autonomous book as it develops. Following the loss of his father (who was killed by a truck carrying live chickens as he lay passed out following a night smoking marijuana with his jazz band) Benny begins to hear voices in everyday objects. While initially harmless enough, following an incident with a pair of scissors who want him to stab his teacher, Benny is sent to a youth mental health facility. Meanwhile, Annabelle is struggling with the decline of her profession as a media monitoring researcher, and demonstrating (to Benny’s dismay) increasing tendencies towards hoarding.