Baileys Prize Winner: The Power
Baileys Prize Winner: The Power
We couldn’t be more pleased for Naomi Alderman, this year’s winner of the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her winning title, The Power, is a brilliantly clever and deeply disturbing feminist science-fiction novel. Many comparisons have been drawn between Alderman’s work and that of the renowned Margaret Atwood, famous for her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood herself said of The Power,
“Electrifying! Shocking! Will knock your socks off! Then you'll think twice, about everything.”
This book considers what it would be like if the shoe was on the other foot - if women had all the power in society. Women the world over start to discover that they have ‘the power’, an ability to inflict agonising pain and even death. Footage of teenage girls electrifying men to death becomes viral. Boys are moved into separate schools for their own safety. Men all over the world find their power and privilege disappearing.
Set against this backdrop, the story follows four main characters: Allie, Roxy, Tunde, and Margot. Through each of their unique stories and experiences, a wider portrait of this world is painted, and shows that no matter who has the power, it will almost always be abused.
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"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
"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" -- The Guardian
"The Power is a fascinating look at what the world might be like if millennia of sexism went the other way...as a whole the narrative feels ingenious...deserves to be read by every woman (and, for that matter, every man)" -- The Times
