The Power

Naomi Alderman's novel imagines a world in which teenage girls develop the ability to send electrical jolts out through their hands, a power that older women then gain from younger ones and that lets women become the dominant sex. The story follows four characters as the change spreads: Roxy, daughter of an English gangster; Tunde, an aspiring Nigerian journalist who films women using the power and posts it online; Margot, a mayor whose daughter Jocelyn is developing it; and Allie, a foster child who escapes an abusive home and takes refuge in a convent. The whole is presented as a manuscript of imagined history, written 5,000 years after the events. The novel was awarded the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction.

Bill Gates read it on his older daughter's recommendation and was glad he did, and it appears on the Goodreads read shelf of Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf.