The Power

Content Ratings

Mild Romance

Several characters have romantic and sexual relationships across the novel; relationships shift in power dynamics as the new order establishes itself; sexual content is present but not graphically explicit.

Intense Themes

The novel is a sustained examination of how power corrupts regardless of gender, whether any group holding absolute power will reproduce the same violence and subjugation, and the structural rather than biological roots of gendered violence.

High Violence

Female-on-male violence escalates from individual acts to institutionalized subjugation, war crimes, and genocidal conflict; the novel depicts rape, torture, and massacre with the same unflinching directness it would apply to male-perpetrated violence in a more conventional novel.

Synopsis

When women and girls around the world develop the ability to generate electrical jolts capable of causing pain or death, the global balance of power inverts over the course of a few decades, and the novel follows several characters across different countries as the new world order is established with women in dominance and men in subjugation. A provocative thought experiment about the relationship between power and gender-based violence. A Baileys Women's Prize winner.