> Skip to content
  • Published: 27 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9780670919963
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $22.99

The Power

Now a Major TV Series with Prime Video




'The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid's Tale' Cosmopolitan

Suddenly - tomorrow or the day after - teenage girls find that with a flick of their fingers, they can inflict agonizing pain and even death. With this single twist, the four lives at the heart of Naomi Alderman's extraordinary, visceral novel are utterly transformed.

  • Published: 27 April 2017
  • ISBN: 9780670919963
  • Imprint: Penguin General UK
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 352
  • RRP: $22.99

About the author

Naomi Alderman

Naomi A. Alderman's first novel, Disobedience, was published in 2006 in ten languages and won the Orange Award for New Writers. In 2007, she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, and one of Waterstone's 25 Writers for the Future. Her second novel, The Lessons, was published in April 2010. Naomi was lead writer on the BAFTA-shortlisted alternate reality game Perplex City and writes a weekly games column for the Guardian. Naomi A. Alderman's 2017 novel, The Power was the winner of the 2017 Baileys women’s prize for fiction.

Also by Naomi Alderman

See all

Praise for The Power

Electrifying

Margaret Atwood

A big, brash, page-turning, thought-provoking thriller

Guardian

A fascinating look at what the world might be like if millennia of sexism went the other way. Ingenious . . . deserves to be read by every woman (and, for that matter, every man)

The Times

The Handmaid's Tale for the Gone Girl generation

Grazia

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

A feminist science-fiction story that's about to make waves

Red

A gripping read and a reminder of the true joy of a truly engaging story

Stylist

A raw, gutsy slice of speculative dystopia

Metro

A stone cold genius

Sarah Perry

As awesome as it is compulsive

Heat, 5 stars

Electrifying! Shocking! Will knock your socks off! Then you'll think twice, about everything

Margaret Atwood

Frenetic sci-fi novel

Daily Mail

If you enjoy Margaret Atwood's dystopian fiction, this strong, substantial novel is for you

Woman & Home

Like the best science fiction, this dystopian feminist fantasy holds up a mirror to the here and now

Mail on Sunday

Naomi's super-charged, subversive novel....forcing you to rethink everything

Psychologies

The Hunger Games crossed with The Handmaid's Tale

Cosmopolitan

Thought-provoking novel

Glamour

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

Guardian

When we say that The Power is profoundly disturbing and you may well want to argue with it as you read, we mean that in a good way

SFX, Five Stars

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

Alderman is a fluent and powerful writer

Sunday Times

One of my favourite books of 2016 - clever, harrowing and thought-provoking

Paula Hawkins, best-selling author of The Girl on the Train

Electrifying

Margaret Atwood

It's a feminist dystopian page-turner of a thriller and I'm IN LOVE with it

Marian Keyes

It's magnificent. I'm agog. Really, I'm several gogs. So smart and scary and sad but true

Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This year's Baileys winner is simultaneously a high-concept thought experiment and a rollercoaster, action packed read

Guardian

The Power by Naomi Alderman is the feminist flipside to The Handmaid's Tale, asking what happens when women are suddenly the stronger sex

Evening Standard

An enthrallingly told Cassandra-like prophecy from the ever-inventive Naomi Alderman

Observer

This book sparks with such electric satire that you should read it wearing insulated gloves

Washington Post

The Power is at once as streamlined as a 90-minute action film and as weirdly resonant as one of Atwood's own early fictions

Boston Globe

In this fierce and unsettling novel, the ability to generate a dangerous electrical force from their bodies lets women take control, resulting in a vast, systemic upheaval of gender dynamics across the globe

New York Times Books of the Year

It's a riveting story, told in fittingly electric language, that explores how power corrupts everyone: those new to it and those resisting its loss'

New York Times

I loved it; it was visceral, provocative and curiously pertinent . . . The story has stayed with me since

Stylist, the decade's 15 best books by remarkable women
penguin pop image
penguin pop image