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The March pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club is ‘The Power’

We’re excited to announce that Naomi Alderman’s “The Power” is our March pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.” It’s a genre we haven’t tackled yet: science fiction.

"The Power" by Naomi Alderman. Courtesy of Little, Brown & Company

In “The Power,” Alderman imagines a future in which women have special (electrostatic) powers that flip the established gender dynamics and turn the world on its head.

Alderman explores “how power corrupts everyone: those new to it, and those resisting its loss,” Amal El-Mohtar writes in her review of the book in the New York Times Book Review.

“I was riveted by every page,” writes El-Mohtar. “Alderman’s prose is immersive and, well, electric, and I felt a closed circuit humming between the book and me as I read.”

This is the fourth novel by Alderman, a British novelist and game writer who has also created a zombie apocalypse app and immersive fiction podcast.

“The Power” won the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. We hope you’ll read along.

In the coming days, we’ll post discussion questions for “The Power,” an annotated excerpt and writing advice from Alderman. And at the end of the month, she will answer your questions on the PBS NewsHour.

Just joining? Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up for our newsletter. You can find all of our book club content here, or look back at our conversations about previous selections for the book club below: