The Power

Influenced by the dystopian futuristic vision of Margaret Atwood’s landmark 1985 feminist work The Handmaid’s Tale, Naomi Alderman’s 2016 novel The Power fuses genre elements of speculative fiction with the traditional historical novel. Part allegory, part satire, the novel depicts a near-contemporary world in which women move into positions of real power through an inexplicable genetic anomaly: they develop an extra braid of muscle along their collarbones that enables them to shoot devastating jolts of electricity through their fingertips.

The Power is a frame narrative. A historian five-thousand years in the future has written a historical novel about the ten years leading up to an unspecified global catastrophe that hurled humanity back to the “Stone Age” and from which emerged the new world of empowered women. He is negotiating to find a publisher for the novel. Tapping into the international craze generated by the Hulu series based on Atwood’s work, Alderman’s novel became an international best seller and was optioned as a series on Amazon Prime. The novel won the U.K.’s prestigious Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, awarded annually to the most outstanding English-language novel about women by a woman.