The Power has already been wildly praised and was awarded this year’s Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. I have to concur with established opinion: Naomi Alderman has written an exhilaratingly intelligent book that is as funny as it is politically acute. I can’t think of another novel that is quite so thrilling a read (or, indeed, one that had me whooping with delight after just sixteen pages).

Alderman tells the story of the rise of a gynocracy, driven initially by the discovery that teenage girls can generate electricity within their bodies. This is a ‘power’ that is at first used in a playful, self-protective way against would-be lovers, and later for more sinister means, as the