It felt like people were saying: ‘All the gains have been made, everything has been done, it’s all finished.’ People are not saying that any more.” She points to Donald Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton as having “slapped a lot of people awake” and she credits the internet with giving women a way to record the multiple aggressions and infringements to their freedom.īut she is also optimistic, taking hope from the fact that it was a male parliament who voted to admit women’s suffrage, and she describes the women’s movement as “the most successful revolution of the 20th and 21st centuries. Photograph: Clay EnosĪs we talk about contemporary feminism, she remembers that, “certainly in the 90s, when I was a young woman, that was quite an arid time in conversation about women’s lives. In her Baileys acceptance speech, Alderman declared that “my life would be more possible with the women’s movement existing and no running water than the other way around … And I suppose one of the things the book is about is that the support and the power of other women has been more vital to me than electricity.” She also implored the audience to go and see Wonder Woman, throughout which, she says, she wept. I don’t have the answers to the problems of gender but hopefully I have some interesting questions.” What did she want to achieve? “One of the things that I’ve been really thrilled by in the reception of the book is how many people want to talk about it,” she replies, “and that is what I really hoped. It is a bold – and even enticing – proposition, told with panache and commitment. A work of science fiction featuring four protagonists, it imagines a world in which women have physical dominance over men via their ability to electrocute them at will, and where institutional, social, political and personal power reverses. Each book is strikingly different – “I like to move things on,” she says – and The Power is another departure.

Two further novels followed: The Lessons, about a group of students at Oxford, and The Liars’ Gospel, a retelling of the story of Jesus from different perspectives. The Power is 42-year-old Alderman’s fourth novel, and comes a decade after her much-praised debut, Disobedience, the story of a young woman who returns from New York to the orthodox Jewish north London of her youth. Well-wishers, including novelist Ali Smith and musician and writer Tracey Thorn, pop by to add their congratulations. Alderman’s mother, father, boyfriend and assorted family friends sit at a table filled with champagne flutes and cakes, at one point it is noted that the author is on the BBC website home page. But our surroundings are anything but quiet.

Naomi alderman's the power