Lucy Apps’s debut novel tells the story of 19-year-old Gloria, who is living in east London with her mum in the summer of 1999. Gloria has a learning disability and is past the age when the state might offer her support. Often she is happy enough “to stop outdoors where it is nice and busy, and watch things happen and be part of it”.

But sometimes people steal from her, or shout abuse. Then she has a “heavy feeling inside her” because she has no option except “to walk around the parks and streets on her own trying not to attract too much attention”. When she develops a friendship with Jack, she is happy because: “He has no one to talk to and she has no one to listen to, so they can fit with each other.”

Gloria merely wants to eat chips or drink a coke in a pub, but Jack often rants about the end of the world. “He is waiting the summer out, waiting the city out, counting down to zero.” For Jack, the attraction of Gloria is that he can do what he likes with her. He may not be obviously motivated by sex, but he certainly craves control.

Apps has not set herself an easy task in writing this novel. How do you show Gloria’s limited view of the world without making the book itself simplistic? Initially, the text feels slightly jarring. The sentences are short and their structure is simple. Apps has chosen the third person, but the text often seems to push towards first person.

The consistent use of “don’t” in place of “doesn’t” is distracting and sometimes the reader struggles to differentiate between what is said by the narrator and what is free, indirect speech emanating from within Gloria. However, as the narrative develops these initial stumbling blocks drop away. We understand that for Gloria language is less about meaning and more about finding comfort in rhythm and pattern. (“Wrongwi that wrongwi that wrongwi that.”)

Also, moments of beauty elevate her experience, giving the reader a wonderful sense of the streetscapes of east London. Gloria experiences much of the world as sensation and pattern, and Apps cleverly uses this lens to pick out small details that bring the wider world into sharp focus.

Despite the narrow viewpoint, the secondary characters are engaging. Gloria’s mother is doing her best, but when she is at work all day how can she supervise her daughter? Tyrone, Gloria’s carer in the later part of the book, is resolute and patient. He wants (and deserves) time and a half for spending a dire night searching for her, but is also motivated by real concern and compassion.

When Jack commits a terrible crime, Gloria is asked to give evidence. In the court process, Gloria is assured that she won’t encounter Jack. The tragedy is that she actually wants to see him because, although she does understand his crime, she still just wants to have a friend. Memories of violence have left her traumatised, but the talking therapies that might help others are of no use to her.

This is a carefully structured novel that grows in impact and tension. Gentle, tender and troubling, it takes us inside the life of a person whose world would generally be closed to us. The end of the book is heartbreaking as it reinforces how small Gloria’s needs are. Apps is purposely not making any wider societal point within the close focus of this novel. But the reader, of course, asks why our society is so fast and fragmented that no one has time for Gloria – even though all she needs is a little kindness and company.

Gloria Don’t Speak by Lucy Apps is published by Weatherglass (£12.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

‘One of my Hinge prompts is: ‘What’s the best book you read this year?’ and I swipe left on anyone who says a book I don’t like,” says 29-year-old Ayo*. “Someone once replied with a book by Jordan Peterson, which was a massive ick.”

It’s a blunt approach to romance, but Ayo is far from alone. Books have long functioned as cultural shorthand for personality – signals of taste and worldview – but dating apps have accelerated and intensified that process. In an attention economy that rewards speed, these signifiers have to be legible at a glance.

“I prefer contemporary literary fiction or interesting classics in the broadest sense,” Ayo says. “Authors such as Ben Lerner, Sheila Heti, Annie Ernaux – if someone mentions one of those, I’ll be impressed and intrigued. And if it’s a Fitzcarraldo, I’m more likely to match regardless of whether I’ve read it or not.”

The modern dating profile is something of a compressed CV. Saying you love romance might hint at emotional openness; fantasy or sci-fi might suggest nerdiness; poetry gestures at sensitivity; modernism at seriousness (or at least the desire to appear serious). Plus, the thrill of spotting someone who loves the same novel as you can feel like fate.

Platform data shared with the Guardian suggests daters are increasingly leaning on book-based signals. In the last year, mentions of reading in Tinder bios in the UK are up 29% overall and 41% among women. On dating app Feeld, about 7% of UK profiles explicitly mention reading; users who connect with other readers are almost 10% more likely to report a “meaningful connection”. On Hinge, “book” is one of the most frequent words that daters around the world share in their responses to the prompt “My simple pleasures”.

Data from freelancer platform 99designs released this month showed that 42% of Americans want a partner who reads regularly, and 38% find profiles that mention books more attractive. The message is clear: books are doing some very heavy lifting in the dating economy.

“It’s not hard to see the appeal,” says Luke Brunning, a philosophy lecturer at the University of Leeds and co-director of its Centre for Love, Sex and Relationships. “The excitement of seeing someone who enjoys the niche book you love can be real, abiding and tell us something about their taste and character.”

Erinne Paisley, a researcher studying digital intimacy at the University of Copenhagen, agrees. “We live in an age of anxiety and some of this can be a connection to safety – we want to get a full picture of someone because the version of ourselves on dating apps is fragmented,” she says.

These signals are increasingly sorted into the language of “green flags” and “red flags” – a discourse turbocharged by social media, where certain titles or genres are treated as instant proxies for someone’s values, politics or emotional availability.

The paradox is that books are now both a badge of authenticity and a performance. That tension – between actual taste and strategic signalling – maps on to the “performative men” discourse: the suspicion that some men curate feminist politics or literary taste as a dating strategy rather than them being their authentically held beliefs and preferences.

Caitlin, 25, has seen both sides of this. “At university I was in a life-shattering ‘situationship’ with a guy who ran a Ulysses book group,” she says. “Even at the time, when I really liked him, I thought it was a bit of an ick. I’ve still never read it because of that dating experience.” Dating someone a few years later, she was initially thrilled to see Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own on a man’s bookshelf alongside a host of books by women – a green flag, she thought, proof of feminist sensibilities. “And then he just turned out to be terrible, too.”

Others also describe the letdown when the performance collapses in real life. “I had a Ben Lerner Hinge prompt up for six months in the hopes that one day someone would reply, and they’d be the one,” says Ella*. The prompt did eventually get her a date: “Unfortunately, he wasn’t it – just a lawyer who lectured me on Tarkovsky.” Harry’s* worst date was with someone whose profile said she was writing a book, only for her to admit over drinks that she had completed an English literature degree without reading a single book and couldn’t name one she enjoyed.

But dating shortcuts can also risk flattening people into types, and can sometimes invite bias. A love of airport novels doesn’t preclude emotional or intellectual depth, just as a shelf of modernist doorstoppers doesn’t guarantee it.

“Classism is the major risk,” Brunning says. “There can be many reasons why some people cannot read, read less than us, read different material to us, or are hesitant to disclose their reading habits. We should be careful not to let our prejudices exclude these people as potential partners.”

Paisley also worries that there is a risk of turning dating into a consumer exercise, where people are discarded for minor mismatches in taste rather than engaged with as complex, evolving individuals.

“Red flag discourse can be helpful when referring to dangerous or harmful behaviour, but it also can be harmful in that it encourages us to find a partner who ticks every box, who we have an initial spark with, and with whom that spark never wavers,” she says. “This isn’t how relationships always work. Think about friendships – there will be times of growth and negotiation.” If books have become dating shorthand, then perhaps they should be taken as a rough translation at best.

*Some names have been changed

Hungry for niche knowledge to impress your colleagues? Troubled by the size of a hefty new book? Doubt your abilities to understand complex arguments? Well, today an increasingly competitive industry offers to take away these problems with one product: a book summary app.

Since these digital services first promised to boil down a title, usually a nonfiction work, a decade ago, the marketplace has become crowded. So much so that authors and publishers are concerned about the damage to sales, as well as to the habit of concentrated reading.

Some successful writers, including Amy Liptrot, also fear that apps such as Blinkist, Bookey, getAbstract and the latest, Headway, may be undermining the book trade and misrepresenting content.

Liptrot has approached her union, the Society of Authors, for advice on how to take action. She was alarmed last week to find her acclaimed 2015 memoir, The Outrun, now a film starring Saoirse Ronan, being peddled in potted form on Bookey. “It was unnerving to see a totally fictional quotation purporting to be from my book,” she told the Observer. “These apps are very anti-literary. They’re for people who want to absorb the key ideas without reading the book. I don’t mind a bland, soulless summary, but I do mind a false quotation.”

Diana Gerald, chief executive of the charity BookTrust, is also disturbed by the influence of these apps on young readers. “Book summaries can be a useful starting point. However, it goes without saying that improvements in mental health, in sparking imagination, empathy and language acquisition that reading can have, come from reading the book itself,” she said.

Writer Susie Alegre also sees lurking danger. “The trend towards apps that summarise books so that you can ‘think better’ is likely to have the opposite effect – if we don’t use our minds to reflect deeply, we may lose our ability to think critically at all,” she said, citing research which showed that our reliance on satellite navigation was already rewiring our brains and “destroying our ability to navigate the physical world”.

“Relying on summaries of big ideas might do the same for our capacity for deep thought,” added Alegre, whose forthcoming book Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being Human in the Age of AI is published in early May.

“AI is famously prone to hallucinations: if you read an AI-generated summary of a book, there is no guarantee that it actually reflects the content,” she said, pointing out that writers’ “already meagre income” could be destroyed by the summary-app business.

The publishing industry is also on alert. Andrew Franklin, founder director of Profile Books, understands the worry: “These apps are potentially depriving authors of income and bookshops of custom. It is quite a serious way of infringing copyright, although not technically wrong, as you are allowed to summarise a text. These apps are really just the same as the adverts that pop up offering you an effortless way to lose weight without exercise.”

The new crib sites function a little like the York Notes study guide series for British students, (or Cliffs Notes in the US), but have less analytical content and tend to compete over the niche business areas they cover.

Not all in the book world are concerned. Toby Mundy, executive director of the prestigious Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction, wonders if these apps might prove a gateway for readers to actual books.

He said: “When people want to know about a subject, they might start with Wikipedia or a precis app, but publishing is fundamentally about voices. If you want to know about the Russian Revolution – and I mean really know – then most people will turn to Orlando Figes’s masterpiece, A People’s Tragedy, rather than a dreary textbook, because it combines authoritative scholarship with tremendous literary verve. Precis apps might disrupt certain genres, business books perhaps, but they are intrinsically anti-voice and philistine.”

Industry pundit Scott Pack, a former head book buyer for Waterstones, agrees that threats like this have risen before, with successful print series such as The Bluffer’s Guides and an earlier boom in abridged novels. “I would prefer someone to read a whole book, of course, but better an app than nothing.

“We can have a kneejerk reaction against anything digital if we are not careful,” he said.

Like Franklin and Mundy, Pack also points to the rise of Reader’s Digest in the last century.

“These things come and go,” said Franklin. “But there’s no substitute for reading the whole book, even for students. After all, these days they could get AI to write their entire essay if they want to cheat.”

The Observer approached Bookey about Liptrot’s concerns but received no reply.