It only gets about a third of the way through the novel, stopping before the really disturbing scenarios (there’s talk of another couple of series). The TV version is a nine-parter that highlights how young women react to acquiring their power. That has been a journey of my life, actually, to learn to feel, really fully feelĪnd now The Power is an exciting, not-so-dark TV show, about to launch on Amazon.

Imagine how you would move through the world! The main characters have their lives upturned through acquiring it: American Allie, an abused foster child, becomes a cult leader, with working-class Londoner Roxy her violent second-in-command Margot, a middle-aged American mayor, finds it gives her more political power Tatiana, wife of the president of Moldova, takes over the country and Tunde, a Nigerian journalist, has his life enhanced through his reporting of the new phenomenon, but eventually severely reduced. If you’re a woman, you find yourself checking your body to see if, perhaps, you might have that thrilling electric gift. She herself can cope with most things in fiction, “though I tried reading The North Water, a beautifully written book, but it’s got lots of cruelty towards animals and I had to stop”.Īnyhow, she’s aware that her book’s darkness is seductive (that’s the point). “I’m just writing about the world.” Her mentor is Margaret Atwood, who has also mirrored real-life atrocities in her writing, particularly in The Handmaid’s Tale plus, Alderman has had some traumatic – and, be warned, potentially triggering – experiences of her own, which we’ll get to later. “I don’t blame myself for that,” says Alderman. The Power is wild and gripping, but it’s a dark book. Others became just as casually vicious as the men whose privileges they took. Spoiler: some women used their power to break sex-trafficking rings, or overthrow misogynistic regimes. And then she explored what that might mean. She gave women a new physical gift – the ability to emit a sudden, forceful, electrical charge, a bit like electric eels – that meant they could shock and kill other people very easily. Does that sound vague? Alderman tackled it by turning the world upside down. The big idea, what is actually going on, in her 2016 award-winning novel The Power, is how “the capacity to do violence” gives an advantage in society. How can I get at the underlying structure here? The real underlying problem? What is actually going on?”

But as a novelist, what I’m good at is that bit where you go: OK. And it’s not that I don’t love that stuff – I do. “If you were to set me to write an intimate kitchen sink drama about four people in a house, I would be constantly chafing at the bit. “I think I’m very good at big thinking and big ideas,” she says.

Naomi alderman's novel the power