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A Novel
by Ali Smith
Book Reviewed by:From a literary master, a moving and genre-bending story about our era-spanning search for meaning and knowing.
An uncertain near-future. A story of new boundaries drawn between people daily. A not-very brave new world.
Add two children. And a horse.
From a Scottish word meaning a transient moment, a shock, a faint glimpse, Gliff explores how and why we endeavour to make a mark on the world. In a time when western industry wants to reduce us to algorithms and data—something easily categorizable and predictable—Smith shows us why our humanity, our individual complexities, matter more than ever.
An ominous vision of a dystopian future of techno-totalitarianism, Gliff is a cautionary tale all too relevant for our current day—a time when surveillance technology is increasingly prevalent, algorithms control the information we see through our social media feeds, a handful of tech oligarchs have growing political sway, and democratic institutions are in decline worldwide. The book deals with dark topics—oppression, inequality, prejudice—but it is also about individual resilience, human connection, and meaning. Those are heavy themes, but Smith writes with a light touch, lacing the narration with playful cultural references, humor, puns, double meanings, and whimsical flourishes. Indeed, elements of the book read like a fairy tale or fable...continued
Full Review
(1397 words)
(Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach).
In Ali Smith's Gliff, two children living in a sinister surveillance state in the not-too-distant future return home to find a line of red paint circling their house. In this dystopian society where all-pervasive technology tracks and controls every aspect of people's lives, these red painted lines are used to flag those who have been judged to be socially unacceptable, marking them off from the rest of society.
On a symbolic level, these red painted circles are a brilliantly evocative image, calling to mind the red circles a teacher inks around mistakes or a proofreader's marks flagging text for deletion or correction. Inevitably, there are also echoes of the term "redlining"—discrimination through systematic exclusion—...
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by Laila Lalami
Published 2025
READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK AS FEATURED ON TODAY ● From Laila Lalami—the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist and a "maestra of literary fiction" (NPR)—comes a riveting and utterly original novel about one woman's fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.
by Celeste Ng
Published 2023
From the #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, comes one of the most highly anticipated books of the year – the inspiring new novel about a mother's unbreakable love in a world consumed by fear.
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