The Power

The skein, a new organ that lets women and girls discharge lethal electrical current, spreads globally within a single novel's timeframe, and Alderman refuses the easy version of that premise, a straightforward feminist wish fulfillment, in favor of tracking how fast the newly powerful start reproducing every abuse they'd just escaped. Roxy, daughter of a London gangster, Allie, a foster-care runaway who reinvents herself as the prophet Mother Eve, and Margot, an American politician who rides the power into national office, each chart a different route from vulnerability to dominance, and the novel is explicit that dominance, once achieved, behaves the same regardless of which sex is exercising it.

Tunde, the one major male viewpoint character, works as a journalist chronicling the power's spread, and his gradual transformation from documentarian to endangered outsider, harassed, assaulted, eventually hunted, gives the novel its clearest inversion of who gets to move safely through public space. Alderman uses his fear in exactly the ordinary, procedural way women's fear usually gets written, curfews, safety calculations, second-guessing which men in a room are dangerous, except now it's men doing the calculating.

The framing device, a novel-length manuscript by a male writer named Neil, submitted to a female mentor named Naomi roughly five thousand years after the events described, closes the loop with real bite: Naomi's editorial notes gently suggest the book would be more plausible, more marketable, if Neil published it under a woman's name, or at least paired it with a male pseudonym, and that reversed publishing condescension is Alderman's cleanest single joke about how thoroughly gendered assumptions about competence and authority survive any given distribution of actual physical power.

The fictional post-Soviet state of Bessapara, seized by women fleeing sex trafficking and consolidated under the dictator Tatiana Moskalev, gives Alderman a controlled environment for the novel's darkest material: a nation built explicitly on female power that produces its own purges, its own men stripped of legal rights, its own state violence, at a speed and scale the more diffuse Western settings can't match. Bessapara is where the novel stops arguing by inversion and starts arguing by acceleration, showing in miniature what the whole world is drifting toward.