![The Power](https://cdn.slatesource.com/f/c/d/fcd8066f-1dbb-4443-9526-6e2553e5906e.webp)

# The Power

- [Made in Slatesource](https://slatesource.com/u/steph/the-power)
- By [Steph](https://slatesource.com/u/Steph)
- Arts & Culture
- Created on May 4, 2026

![](https://cdn.slatesource.com/f/c/d/fcd8066f-1dbb-4443-9526-6e2553e5906e.webp)

## The Power

What if women could electrocute men? Alderman follows the logic everywhere it goes and the conclusion is not comfortable for anyone.

## The Skein

Naomi Alderman's 2016 Baileys Women's Prize winner imagines a near-future world in which women develop a biological organ called the skein that allows them to generate and release powerful electrical charges. Within years the global power structure is inverted. Told through four converging protagonists including a young politician, a mob heiress, a journalist, and a teenager who awakens the power in older women, the novel traces how the new order replicates the exact violence and corruption of the old one. The framing device presents the novel as a historical account written thousands of years in the future.

journey·6 Parts

# Reading The Power

Charge

/

Part

The Awakening

Electric

"Girls in classrooms and prisons discovering something they did not know they had."

> Doesn't matter if it's true. Matters if you believe it.

Alderman developed the novel with the mentorship of Margaret Atwood, who read drafts and pushed her to follow the premise further. Atwood is thanked in the acknowledgements and called it one of the most striking speculative fiction novels in years.

Alderman grew up Orthodox Jewish in London and has spoken about how the novel emerged from thinking about the relationship between religious authority, physical power, and the stories societies tell about both.

[Find a copy near you](https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Power+Naomi+Alderman+book&utm_source=slatesource)