by Naomi Alderman
Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Oct 2017
400 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
Women's Prize for Fiction, 2017
"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." - Washington Post
"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." - New York Times Book Review
"Richly imagined, ambitious, and propulsively written." -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." - NPR
"Alderman's tilted dystopia is a smartly layered place of slippery slopes and moral ambiguities, a fitting folktale for strange times." - Entertainment Weekly
"Narratively complex, philosophically searching, and gorgeously rendered." - Elle
"An instant classic of speculative fiction... Smart, readable and joyously achieved."
- The Guardian (UK)
"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
This information about The Power was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Naomi Alderman is the recipient of the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction for The Power. She is also the author of The Liars' Gospel and Disobedience, which won the Orange Prize for New Writers, has been published in ten languages, and has been made into a film by Rachel Weisz. Alderman was selected for Granta's once-a-decade list of Best of Young British Novelists and was chosen by Margaret Atwood as part of the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. She is the cocreator and lead writer of the bestselling smartphone audio adventure app Zombies, Run! She contributes regularly to The Guardian and presents Science Stories on BBC Radio 4. She lives in London.
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