Sarah A Smith
She’s Electric
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
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back
'To her enemies she was the alien temptress who led Charles I away from the "true religion" of Protestantism and towards royal absolutism.'
Lucy Hughes-Hallett reviews @LeandadeLisle's 'colourful', 'persuasive' new biography of Henrietta Maria.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/royalist-generalissima
'Empathy is our moral portal gun, and it jams from underuse.'
Don Paterson on Portal 2, catching Covid on the Eurostar, and rereading Ian Hamilton’s 'Against Oblivion'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/portal-agony