The Power
by Naomi Alderman
Summary
Teenage girls discover they can generate electricity from their hands. It hurts, it can kill, and once the older women are woken to it too the ability spreads worldwide within months. Alderman then does the thing the premise demands and asks what happens next, seriously, over roughly a decade.
Four people carry it. A London gangster's daughter, an American politician, a Nigerian journalist who becomes the story's camera, and an abused foster child who founds a religion. Their strands run in parallel toward a moment the book keeps naming in advance.
The argument is what makes it more than a reversal. Alderman is not writing a world made gentle by female rule. She is writing about power itself, and her contention is that the abuses follow the capacity rather than the sex, so the reader watches familiar cruelties reappear with the participants swapped. Some readers find that bleak; it is meant to be.
The framing device, in which the whole novel is presented as a historical reconstruction written thousands of years later, pays off in a final exchange of letters that is both very funny and the sharpest thing in the book.
It is fast, structurally clever and not remotely difficult, and it is built to be argued about afterwards, which is a large part of why reading groups have taken to it so completely.
Expect scenes of sexual and physical violence, since that is the subject rather than the decoration. Expect also that the book will not let you settle into the comfortable version of its premise: every time you decide who to root for, Alderman shows you what they have become.
Historical Context & Significance
The Power won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2017, taking the thirty thousand pound award and the bronze figurine known as the Bessie at a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall.
Tessa Ross, chairing the judges, said they kept returning to Alderman's brilliantly imagined dystopia, to her big ideas and her fantastic imagination. It was Alderman's fourth novel and the one that moved her from respected to widely read.
The novel was written while Alderman was being mentored by Margaret Atwood through a scheme pairing established and emerging writers, a connection reviewers seized on given the obvious kinship with The Handmaid's Tale, and the two have discussed the book together publicly since. A television adaptation followed in 2023.