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Summary and Reviews of Gliff by Ali Smith

Gliff by Ali Smith

Gliff

A Novel

by Ali Smith
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  • First Published:
  • Feb 4, 2025, 288 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

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.

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Reviews

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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

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(Reviewed by Elisabeth Herschbach).

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Beyond the Book



Red Lines and Anticipatory Obedience

No symbol with a drawing of a person holding out their handIn 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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Read-Alikes

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