As Margaret Atwood says, “men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.” But what if the opposite were true? Writing in the tradition of Atwood and Le Guin, Naomi Alderman imagines a present where young women around the world discover they have the power to shock others with a touch. Oppressive governments are overthrown overnight, the patriarchy is challenged and a new religion aims to create a feminist utopia. But as the novel’s heroines expand the range of their ambitions, they begin to realize the difficulty of their task: with every human on earth trained since birth to hurt each other, how do you uproot evil from the human condition without destroying civilization in the process? This is an angry, deeply pessimistic book, and I suspect Le Guin or even Atwood might have written a different ending. But at a time when those who abuse women for their own amusement are more visible than ever, The Power (Little Brown, $26) gives catharsis and a portrait of a world that in the end is no crueler or more violent than our own.