Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
**WINNER OF THE 2017 BAILEYS WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION**
What would happen if women suddenly possessed a fierce new power?
In THE POWER, the world is a recognizable place: there’s a rich Nigerian boy who lounges around the family pool; a foster kid whose religious parents hide their true nature; an ambitious American politician; a tough London girl from a tricky family. But then a vital new force takes root and flourishes, causing their lives to converge with devastating effect. Teenage girls now have immense physical power–they can cause agonizing pain and even death. And, with this small twist of nature, the world drastically resets.
From award-winning author Naomi Alderman, THE POWER is speculative fiction at its most ambitious and provocative, at once taking us on a thrilling journey to an alternate reality, and exposing our own world in bold and surprising ways.
“Electrifying! Shocking! Will knock your socks off! Then you’ll think twice, about everything.”―Margaret Atwood
“For diversion (also important in these times), I highly recommend two writers of speculative fiction, Charlie Jane Anders and Naomi Alderman.”―Ayelet Waldman, “By the Book” column, New York Times Book Review
“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
“The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale.“―Cosmopolitan
“Narratively complex, philosophically searching, and gorgeously rendered.”―Lisa Shea, Elle
“Sometimes lightning does strike the same place twice. Sometimes it strikes a whole bunch of times. In Orange Award winner Naomi Alderman’s chilling The Power, women across the globe discover a sudden ability to harness their aggression by inflicting electric shocks through their fingertips. 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
“The Power doesn’t necessarily hold the answers to what organizing principle we should rally around instead…It does audaciously depict, however, 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
“Richly imagined, ambitious, and propulsively written.”―Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
“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
