He thinks of how the woman laughed at him, and worries that if he tells his friends, they would think he was weak.Content warning: This post contains discussion of sexual assault that some may find triggering. In his first encounter with it, a journalist named Tunde is humiliated after a young women spurns his advances with a shock of electricity. Not surprisingly, men find this new female power threatening. "That makes you less afraid all the time." "If you were able to live your life as if you were able to cause hurt when you needed to, your life would be so different, even if you never ever had to do it," Alderman says. The new power makes women physically stronger, and it also changes the way they think about themselves. "If I could go and give to women being sex trafficked right now today in some dirty basement, waiting to be raped - if I could go and give them the power to electrocute people at will, even knowing that this might end badly, I would give it to them." The Week's Best Stories From NPR Books NPR's Book Concierge: Our Guide To 2017's Great ReadsĪlderman says it was gratifying to imagine these scenarios. A character named Roxy uses it for the first time as she is fighting for her life: Young women develop this power as they enter puberty, and it comes as a surprise. "So it's the power to cause pain by violence." "It's some sort of electrical thing which will both hurt you, like an electric shock, and will also somehow trigger the pain centers in your brain," Alderman says. It imagines a world in which women discover they have a weapon that makes them physically threatening to men - and that weapon changes everything. As 2017 draws to a close, another dystopian novel has made it onto some prominent top ten lists: Naomi Alderman's The Power. When the year began, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which depicts a future where women are stripped of all power, began making its way to the top of best-seller lists.
It seems fitting that 2017 has been bookended by two novels about women and power. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Power Author Naomi Alderman
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