Teenage girls start producing an electrical charge from a strand of muscle across the collarbone, enough to hurt, enough to kill. They can wake it in older women. Inside a decade the whole arrangement of the world has flipped. Alderman follows four people through it: A Nigerian journalist filming everything, a London crime family’s daughter, an American politician, and a girl on the run who hears a voice and becomes a religious figure. The move that makes it work is that nothing gets better. Power just changes hands and behaves the same way, and the framing device around the novel makes that the joke and the knife.
The Power