Excitement about Naomi Alderman’s dystopian novel “The Power” has been arcing across the Atlantic since it won the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction eExcitement about Naomi Alderman’s dystopian novel “The Power” has been arcing across the Atlantic since it won the Baileys Prize for Women’s Fiction earlier this year in England. Now, finally, Americans can feel the jolt of this extraordinary book for themselves. Alderman has written our era’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” and, like Margaret Atwood’s classic, “The Power” is one of those essential feminist works that terrifies and illuminates, enrages and encourages.
Alderman’s premise is simple; her execution endlessly inventive: Teenage girls everywhere suddenly discover that their bodies can produce a deadly electrical charge.
The science is unsettled, but not entirely fantastical. After all, electric eels can generate a jolt, why not humans? Alderman describes “a strip of striated muscle across the girls’ collarbones which they name the organ of. . . . .
Truly, this is a remarkable creation, a story both intimate and international, swelling with comedy and outrage, a tale that cradles the world’s most Truly, this is a remarkable creation, a story both intimate and international, swelling with comedy and outrage, a tale that cradles the world’s most fragile people even while it assaults the Subcontinent’s most brutal villains.
It will not convert Roy’s political enemies, but it will surely blast past them. Here are sentences that feel athletic enough to sprint on for pages, feinting in different directions at once, dropping disparate allusions, tossing off witty asides, refracting competing ironies. This is writing that swirls so hypnotically that it doesn’t feel like words on paper so much as ink in water. Every paragraph dares you to keep up, forcing you finally to stop asking questions, to stop grasping for chronology and just. . . .
“Saints for All Occasions,” the new novel by J. Courtney Sullivan, is so unassuming that its artistry looks practically invisible. In fact, from the o“Saints for All Occasions,” the new novel by J. Courtney Sullivan, is so unassuming that its artistry looks practically invisible. In fact, from the outside, nothing about this story seems noteworthy: Irish Catholics settle in Boston; they drink too much; they struggle with the church; they gather for a loved one’s wake.
That sounds as fresh as a pint of last week’s Guinness.
Which makes this quiet masterpiece all the more impressive. In a simple style that never commits a flutter of extravagance, Sullivan draws us into the lives of the Raffertys, and in the rare miracle of fiction makes us care about them like they were our own family.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this novel is its. . . . .
Standing at the shoreline on a calm, moonless night, you can hear a low-pitched roar. Some say it’s just the waves; others claim it’s a winged monsterStanding at the shoreline on a calm, moonless night, you can hear a low-pitched roar. Some say it’s just the waves; others claim it’s a winged monster swimming through the watery depths. But it’s actually the sound of thousands of fans cheering for “The Essex Serpent,” an irresistible new novel by Sarah Perry.
Last month, “The Essex Serpent” won the British Book Award, and it’s already sold more than 250,000 copies, which should convince any skeptic that this slippery beast is real.
There have been sightings for months in America: tantalizing tweets, shots of its gorgeous cover on Instagram, breathless reports from tourists vacationing in London. But now the novel has finally washed up on our shores.
Admittedly, the Loch Ness Monster has better PR, but the Flying Serpent of Essex has been terrifying residents since it was first reported in 1669. Perry sets her story near that spot in a fictional village called Aldwinter more than 200 years later. In the enlightened 1890s, the creatures.....
Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel, “A Book of American Martyrs,” arrives splattered with our country’s hot blood. As the Republican Congress plots to cripJoyce Carol Oates’s new novel, “A Book of American Martyrs,” arrives splattered with our country’s hot blood. As the Republican Congress plots to cripple Planned Parenthood and the right to choose hinges on one vacant Supreme Court seat, “American Martyrs” probes all the wounds of our abortion debate. Indeed, it’s the most relevant book of Oates’s half-century-long career, a powerful reminder that fiction can be as timely as this morning’s tweets but infinitely more illuminating. For as often as we hear that some novel about a wealthy New Yorker suffering ennui is a story about “how we live now,” here is a novel that actually fulfills that promise, a story whose grasp is so wide and whose empathy is so boundless that it provides an ultrasound of the contemporary American soul.
The opening pages explode. Immediately we’re there, inside the head of. . . .
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