08/28/2017
Alderman’s science fiction novel, set all over the world, was awarded the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Sometime in the near future, young women discover they have within them the ability to unleash skeins of electrical current that can maim and kill. One of them, an abused American foster child, joins a group of nuns, reinventing herself as the healer Mother Eve. She promotes a new religion in which Jews look to Miriam, Muslims to Fatimah, Christians to Mary. Her ally is an English crime lord’s daughter named Roxy, whose skein is warrior strong, and whose violent family has global connections. Meanwhile Tunde, an opportunistic photojournalist, manages to break the news of several women’s revolts across the world. The first upheavals are in Saudi Arabia and Moldova, places where women have few rights. But the woman who rules Bessapara, the first nation of the new world order, is unscrupulous and afraid, and she creates further instability by stripping men in her country of all rights and implicitly threatening world war. Roxy runs into trouble trying to keep a lid on this international situation, while Mother Eve convinces herself it might be for the best to start the world anew. Margot, an American politician taught to tap into her skein by her daughter, rises to power in the States, her message becoming more hawkish as she gains influence. But she is corrupted by her addiction to power over her male rivals, and she, too, plays a part in the endgame. Alderman tests her female characters by giving them power, and they all abuse it. Readers should not expect easy answers in this dystopian novel, but Alderman succeeds in crafting a stirring and mind-bending vision. (Oct.)
Praise for THE POWER:
"Electrifying! Shocking! Will knock your socks off! Then you'll think twice, about everything."—Margaret Atwood
"Magnificent. I'm agog. I'm several gogs. Smart and scary and sad but true. It's a classic, in the way that it's hard to imagine it ever wasn't there."—Joss Whedon
"Alderman has written our era's Handmaid's Tale, and, like Margaret Atwood's classic, The Power is one of those essential feminist works that terrifies and illuminates, enrages and encourages....This book sparks with such electric satire that you should read it wearing insulated gloves."—Ron Charles, Washington Post
"Narratively complex, philosophically searching, and gorgeously rendered."—Lisa Shea, Elle
"Fierce and unsettling...Through immersive prose and a riveting plot, Alderman explores how power corrupts everyone: those who gain it, and those resisting its loss."—Radhika Jones, New York Times Book Review
"Richly imagined, ambitious, and propulsively written."—Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
"Alderman's writing is beautiful, and her intelligence seems almost limitless. She also has a pitch-dark sense of humor that she wields perfectly."—Michael Schaub, NPR
"Alderman's tilted dystopia is a smartly layered place of slippery slopes and moral ambiguities, a fitting folktale for strange times."—Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly
"I was riveted by every page. Alderman's prose is immersive and, well, electric, and I felt a closed circuit humming between the book and me as I read."—Amal El-Mohtar, New York Times Book Review
"An instant classic of speculative fiction... Smart, readable and joyously achieved."
—Justine Jordan, Guardian
"Bold and disturbing...it's not just a book of the moment. The Power is a major innovation in the overlapping genres of feminist dystopia/utopia, science fiction, and speculative fiction."—Elaine Showalter, New York Review of Books
"Fans of speculative fiction (see also: Margaret Atwood and Ben Marcus) about empowered youth will be struck by Alderman's speedy and thorough inhabitation of a world just different enough from ours to jolt the imagination. Mothers, lock up your boys."—Sloane Crosley, Vanity Fair
"Alderman has the daring and good sense to eschew go-girl uplift in favor of terrifying and complex dystopia."—Boris Kachka, Vulture/ New York Magazine
"A suspenseful thrill ride filled with deep, contrasting female leads on a scaffolding of philosophical questions about how different men and women are at heart....Reminiscent of the work of Alderman's mentor Margaret Atwood, The Power is perfect for book clubs, where readers will undoubtedly debate the finer points of nature versus nurture."—Jaclyn Fulwood, Shelf Awareness
"The Power is stupendous. It's gorgeously written, endlessly exciting, fun, and frightening."
—Ayelet Waldman, author of A Really Good Day
"The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid's Tale."
—Cosmopolitan
"What starts out as a fantasy of female empowerment deepens and darkens into an interrogation of power itself, its uses and abuses and what it does to the people who have it... Alderman's breakout work."
—Claire Armitstead, Guardian
"Outstanding... Alderman imagines a world much like ours, with one difference: teenage girls suddenly have the ability to electrocute people. This is the perfect read if you've been itching for something to get you through to season two of The Handmaid's Tale."—Melissa Ragsdale, Bustle
"The Power is at once as streamlined as a 90-minute action film and as weirdly resonant as one of Atwood's own early fictions... Alderman has conducted a brilliant thought experiment in the nature of power itself...Turning the world inside out, she reveals how one of the greatest hallmarks of power is the chance to create a mythology around how that power was used."—John Freeman, Boston Globe
"This is a thriller that terrifies and leaves behind a lingering tingle that's part discomfort and part exhilaration. Easy to read, hard to put down, difficult to forget."—Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing
"The Power is a subtly funny, lyrical and utterly subversive vision of an impossible future. As all the best visionaries do, Alderman shines a penetrating and yet merciful light on to our present and the so many cruelties in which we may be complicit."—A.L. Kennedy
"Please, please, PLEASE read Naomi Alderman's The Power. It'll crack your brain open in all the right ways. Such an important, timely book."
—Literary Death Match
"Audaciously depict[s]...the most extreme results of a movement that seeks rather than interrogates power: That if feminism has become a means for domination, it has lost its way."—Bridget Read, Vogue
"Ingenious....Deserves to be read by every woman (and, for that matter, every man)."
—Francesca Steele, The Times UK
"A page-turning thriller and timely exploration of gender roles, censorship and repressive political regimes, The Power is a must-read for today's times."—Lauren Bufferd, BookPage
"Gripping and disturbing, it pushes the reader — even the confidently feminist reader — to question the assumptions underlying many of the mechanisms that drive relationships between women and men."
—Harper's Bazaar UK
"Alderman's storytelling is visceral and brave; you'll stay up all night reading after a thousand deals with the clock that you'll put it down after just a few more pages. Gleeful, intelligent, clever, and unflinching, The Power is the kind of book to keep a person going."—Fiona Zublin, Ozy
"A searing critique of how power is used in a world in which a long-oppressed class can suddenly fight back."—Renay Williams, Barnes & Noble Blog
★ 2017-07-17
All over the world, teenage girls develop the ability to send an electric charge from the tips of their fingers.It might be a little jolt, as thrilling as it is frightening. It might be powerful enough to leave lightning-bolt traceries on the skin of people the girls touch. It might be deadly. And, soon, the girls learn that they can awaken this new—or dormant?—ability in older women, too. Needless to say, there are those who are alarmed by this development. There are efforts to segregate and protect boys, laws to ensure that women who possess this ability are banned from positions of authority. Girls are accused of witchcraft. Women are murdered. But, ultimately, there's no stopping these women and girls once they have the power to kill with a touch. Framed as a historical novel written in the far future—long after rule by women has been established as normal and, indeed, natural—this is an inventive, thought-provoking work of science fiction that has already been shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in Britain. Alderman (The Liars' Gospel, 2013, etc.) chronicles the early days of matriarchy's rise through the experiences of four characters. Tunde is a young man studying to be a journalist who happens to capture one of the first recordings of a girl using the power; the video goes viral, and he devotes himself to capturing history in the making. After Margot's daughter teaches her to use the power, Margot has to hide it if she wants to protect her political career. Allie takes refuge in a convent after running away from her latest foster home, and it's here that she begins to understand how newly powerful young women might use—and transform—religious traditions. Roxy is the illegitimate daughter of a gangster; like Allie, she revels in strength after a lifetime of knowing the cost of weakness. Both the main story and the frame narrative ask interesting questions about gender, but this isn't a dry philosophical exercise. It's fast-paced, thrilling, and even funny. Very smart and very entertaining.
