The Power

Naomi Alderman published The Power in 2016, and it won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction the following year. The premise is simple to state and takes a whole book to work through: women begin to be able to send an electrical charge through their fingers, and the balance of power between the sexes is overturned.

The novel is framed as a book inside a book. What the reader is given is a manuscript of an imagined history of the twenty-first century, written thousands of years afterwards by a man named Neil Adam Armon, who has submitted it to an author called Naomi Alderman for an early opinion.

That manuscript is presented as a piece of research into how the world got to the Cataclysm, and the novel moves between a handful of characters as the change works through their lives: a girl discovering what she can do, a politician, a journalist and others. The book is a thought experiment about what happens to a society when the ability to do violence changes hands, and it is unsentimental about the answer.