And then Tunde, a young Nigerian man and aspiring journalist who captures early footage of the power in action. There's Margot, an American mayor and one of the few older women to develop the power. There's Allie, a mixed-race girl who runs away after years of abuse and finds herself at a convent, revered as some kind of goddess. There's Roxy, a white British teenager and the daughter of a gangster. Alderman considers how this would affect a variety of people and issues, from terrorism to religion, and she does this through the eyes of four very different people. With obvious nods to rape culture, The Power imagines what the world would be like if men, not women, had to live in constant fear for their physical safety. A world that is built on patriarchy is suddenly upturned - being a woman is synonymous with power and strength, men are the ones afraid to walk alone at night, the female body itself becomes an instrument of power. They can use this power to hurt, to torture, and to kill. Imagine if one day, suddenly, girls developed a strange physical power: they can produce electricity inside them.

It's an intriguing and clever concept, but this never really translates into an engaging story. I have a lot of mixed feelings about Alderman's The Power. What matters is that she could, if she wanted.

It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. The project was commissioned by Booktrust as part of the Story campaign, supported by Arts Council England. She wrote the narrative for The Winter House, an online, interactive yet linear short story visualized by Jey Biddulph. Since its publication in the United Kingdom, it has been issued in the USA, Germany, Israel, Holland, Poland and France and is due to be published in Italy, Hungary and Croatia.

Her literary debut came in 2006 with Disobedience, a well-received (if controversial) novel about a rabbi's daughter from North London who becomes a lesbian, which won her the 2006 Orange Award for New Writers. She and her father were interviewed in The Sunday Times 'Relative Values' feature on 11 February 2007. Her father is Geoffrey Alderman, an academic who has specialised in Anglo-Jewish history. She was the lead writer for Perplex City, an Alternate reality game, at Mind Candy from 2004 through June, 2007. She then went on to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia before becoming a novelist. Naomi Alderman (born 1974 in London) is a British author and novelist.Īlderman was educated at South Hampstead High School and Lincoln College, Oxford where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

Ragazze elettriche by Naomi Alderman