You must read this book. This is the best book I’ve read in a very long time.

The Power by Naomi Alderman explores the nature and dynamics of power. Women have evolved the power to deliver excruciating and fatal pain through their hands, and men have not. Using four different characters whose lives eventually intersect, Alderman explores what it means when the tables turn. When I started reading the book, I thought I knew what Alderman was saying with her story. Women start waking up to their power and the women whose stories Alderman tells are all victims of the ones who previously had the power: trafficked women; women in relationships with violent men; girls growing up with fathers that rape them; successful career women undermined by sexist bosses and co-workers. Examples of things that happen to women everyday.

It’s a relatively short book and it is impressive in the number of ways it explores its theme. It contrasts how different political systems react to the emergence of the power and the way men try to fight it – repressive regimes using violence and democratic regimes using manipulation and psychological control. The book looks at religious power and how it is used, and also personal power and what it means.

It was not long before I realised that the point being made is actually much more complex than it appears on the surface, and I realised I didn’t know what the message was. The women in power do unspeakable things to men without power; again, things done by the powerful to the powerless on a daily basis. The point is not that the status quo is fine, because if you just gender-flipped it then everything would essentially be the same. It is that we need to think much more carefully about power and who has it, and what they can do with it. Because most of us do things, even awful things, just because we can. I finished the book thinking that while Alderman had made me think very deeply about power she has done so without taking a didactic position herself. The story always remains paramount.

I enjoyed the gender-flipping of historical objects scattered throughout. I especially loved the epilogue. I won’t spoil it, but I have had that conversation so many frustrating times and I loved what she did with it. I would have liked a bit more exploration of queerness in the book. Alderman touches on girls born without the power and what that means for them, and on boys who have it, and there are illusions to same-sex relationships, and I would have liked to see that more fully developed. On the whole, this is an awesome and important book and I can’t recommend it highly enough.