The Power
It starts with teenage girls discovering they can produce a jolt of electricity from their fingertips, painful and sometimes deadly. The ability spreads, women learn to wake it in one another, and the old order begins to crack. Naomi Alderman follows four characters across a few years of upheaval, including a London foster child, a Nigerian journalist, an American politician's daughter, and a mayor's daughter who founds a new religion. As women seize control, the novel asks an uncomfortable question about whether power itself corrupts, no matter who holds it.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about The Power
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Teenage girls around the world wake up able to deliver electric shocks from their hands, and within a few years the balance of power between men and women is turned upside down.
Yes. The Power won the 2017 Women's Prize for Fiction, which was then known as the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.
Yes. A television adaptation of The Power premiered on Amazon Prime Video in 2023.
The Power was written by Naomi Alderman, published in 2016 by Little, Brown and Company.
The Power is 386 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Power takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
The Power is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.