The Power Summary

The Power is introduced with a letter: author Neil Adam Armon writes a letter to fellow author Naomi Alderman, thanking her profusely for reading his book, explaining that it is “not quite history, not quite a novel.” What follows is the novel’s text.

Two men break into fourteen-year-old Roxy’s home in London while she and Roxy’s mother are inside. Roxy tries to fight the men and discovers that she can produce an electrostatic shock using only her hands. Though she is able to hurt the men with this power, it is not enough to stop them from knocking Roxy unconscious and murdering her mother. Roxy’s father, a drug kingpin named Bernie Monke, gets revenge on the two men (though Roxy’s older brother Terry is killed in the fight), and Roxy uses her power to kill Primrose, the leader of their gang.

Twenty-one-year old Tunde, who lives in Lagos, Nigeria, has his first experience with the power when he play-wrestles with a girl he likes named Enuma, who shocks him. Tunde doesn’t understand what has happened—he is both aroused by and afraid of this shock—so he films more women as they use this power, selling the footage to various news networks around the world.

Margot, the mayor of an unnamed city in New England, is trying to learn about the power. She learns that only girls seem to have it, and that it comes from a newly developed muscle called a skein. Margot learns that her daughter, Jocelyn, has it. When Margot asks Jocelyn to shock her, the power is awakened in Margot as well. Margot holds a press conference proposing training camps where girls can learn to use their powers more safely. Daniel, the governor of the state, is furious with her for going over his head, but Margot starts getting calls in support of the idea. Within a month, the program is underway, and people also start to suggest Margot run for something more ambitious. Margot realizes how this power “is a kind of wealth”; she becomes more and more blunt with Daniel as she thinks about how easily she could kill him.

Fourteen-year-old Allie has also discovered that she has the power. Her foster father, Mr. Montgomery-Taylor, frequently beats and rapes her, and one day while this is occurring, a voice in her head compels her to kill her father using the power. Spurred again by the voice, she runs away from home and ends up in a convent in South Carolina, where she tells them her name is Eve. At the convent, Allie practices controlling her power and starts to perform a series of miracles. The first is using her power to cure a girl’s epilepsy, though the nuns in the convent don’t realize that she is using her power to do so. They believe that a divine being is speaking to her. Allie takes advantage of this belief and baptizes some of the girls under a new religion, which holds that God is a woman and which focuses on the female figures in each religion (such as Mary, rather than Jesus). One of the nuns believes that this is heresy, and Allie kills her in the middle of the night. She and the other girls take over the convent under the new religion, and start to rewrite Scripture using only the parts that support their ideas.

Tunde travels to Moldova, the capital of human sex-trafficking, where enslaved women start to spark the power in each other and rise up to kill their oppressors. As more and more women are liberated, the President of Moldova, Viktor Moskalev, dies of what looks like a heart attack, and his wife Tatiana is appointed as the interim leader. However, a military coup is staged, and Tatiana is forced to take her half of the army to a castle in the south. Once there, she declares a new nation called Bessapara.

After Roxy kills Primrose, she has to lie low for fear of retribution. She travels to South Carolina to try to meet Eve, whose influence is growing worldwide and whose sermons Roxy has seen on the internet. Roxy has more power than anyone else Allie has ever met, and they become friends over the nine months Roxy stays there. Roxy returns to London and creates a new drug called Glitter, which enhances the strength and duration of women’s power. She uses Eve’s followers to help produce it, and gains influence with Tatiana Moskalev, who is using Glitter to fuel her army of women against the Moldovans. Meanwhile, Allie travels (as Eve) to Bessapara. She meets with Tatiana Moskalev and agrees to endorse the war, asking her followers to support Bessapara so that women can have a place where they are free from oppression.

After Moldova, Tunde next travels to Delhi, where women are also awakening the power in each other and trying to gain more rights. This time, however, one woman paralyzes Tunde with her power and tries to rape him, but other women fortunately pull her off of him. Tunde is deeply shaken by this event, and has a difficult time when a fellow journalist he dates named Nina tries to use her power in bed with him. Tunde interviews a man who goes by the alias UrbanDox, who is a supporter of men’s rights groups that have tried to orchestrate terror attacks against women. UrbanDox believes in a set of conspiracy theories mostly having to do with the idea that women will eventually only keep a few men to father children and will kill the rest.

Margot runs against Daniel for governor. During their on-air debate, he insults Margot’s daughters and she involuntarily shocks him. Voters are seemingly appalled at this violence, but election day tells a different story: people think she is strong, and Margot is elected governor. Jocelyn, meanwhile, attends the NorthStar training camps Margot has set up for girls, particularly because some days she has trouble controlling her power and some days she has none at all. Jocelyn is often made fun of and made to feel weak.

Roxy’s middle brother Ricky is raped and castrated by a group of women using their power, and she and her younger brother Darrell go to get revenge on the three girls who committed the crime. They tell her that Ricky was “asking for it.” Roxy gives them all horrific facial scars. Roxy’s stepmother Barbara thanks her for avenging Ricky, and recognizes that Roxy should be the natural inheritor of Bernie’s crime ring. She gives Roxy notes concerning Bernie’s business, which ultimately lead Roxy and Darrell to discover that it was Bernie who actually ordered Roxy’s mother killed. Roxy and Darrell then threaten Bernie and force him to retire so that Roxy can take over the business.

Four years later, the war is still raging on in Bessapara. Tatiana Moskalev invites Margot (now a United States Senator), Eve, Roxy, and Tunde to a reception meant to drum up support for Bessapara. Before the party, Jocelyn visits Eve, who is able to cure the problems she experienced with her power. Tatiana and Margot strike a deal: Tatiana will employ the NorthStar women as a private army, and in exchange the U.S. will not interfere with some of the impending changes to Bessapara’s law. Margot agrees. Later at the party, both Tunde and Eve are appalled to see Tatiana force a young man to lick up wine from the floor (and some glass shards from the broken bottle with it) after interrupting her.

Following the party, Roxy goes to a business meeting Darrell has set up. But when she arrives, she is knocked unconscious and her skein is surgically removed and implanted in Darrell: a plan carried out by Bernie. Roxy is able to escape after the surgery and runs into the forest. In the days after the party, Tunde reports on the increasingly unjust laws Bessapara is putting in place. There are now laws limiting men’s travel and work without the permission of a female guardian, and if men are caught breaking the laws, they can be killed. Meanwhile, Darrell has taken over operations at the Glitter factory in Bessapara, telling the other women that Roxy is on a vacation and not revealing that he now has the power of Roxy’s skein.

As Tunde travels in Bessapara, he becomes increasingly fearful of the women he meets along the road, worried that he might be killed for not having the correct papers. One day, he reads his own obituary in the news, and learns that Nina (to whom he sent many of his interviews and photographs) has stolen his materials and is publishing a book without crediting him. That evening, Tunde is forced to flee to the forest, where he witnesses a cultish ceremony in which a boy is sacrificed to a blind woman. He is then captured by this group, but he meets and befriends Roxy, who saves him from the blind woman. They walk to a refugee camp, but a gang of women soon attacks the camp. Roxy and Tunde witness the brutal rape and murder of a man, then escape the forest. That evening, they tell each other about Nina’s and Darrell’s crimes against them, and make love.

Meanwhile, Eve is trying to figure out how she can feel safe and allow women to be completely dominant over men. That night, Eve uses her power to manipulate the muscles in Tatiana’s arm, causing Tatiana to slit her own throat with a letter opener. Eve is then elected the new leader of Bessapara.

Jocelyn, meanwhile, is stationed in Bessapara with the army of women from the NorthStar camps, and she is given suspicious drugs in order to enhance her power that she suspects may be Glitter. Realizing that Margot and NorthStar are likely in cahoots with a drug ring, Jocelyn goes to Darrell’s factory to investigate. There, Darrell uses his power for the first time to almost kill Jocelyn. The other women at the factory are aghast, realizing that he must have stolen Roxy’s skein. They electrocute him and literally pull him limb from limb.

Roxy then helps Tunde escape the country and returns to the factory, where she learns the women have killed Darrell. She then meets up with Eve, who confesses her plan to spark a global war that will send society back to the Stone Age. Society can then be rebuilt in a way that assumes women have always been dominant. Roxy is horrified at this idea, and the two part ways. Eve speaks to a crowd calling upon America to support Bessapara in the war against the North Moldovans. Margot, upon learning of Jocelyn’s injuries at the hands of a man, counsels the U.S. president to aid Bessapara. Like Eve, she wants to burn the society down to rebuild it. The novel’s text ends with the implication that this in fact, comes to pass, with the development of a society in which women are dominant and Eve is the primary religious figure.

Naomi writes back to Neil, saying that she enjoyed the book but that she is surprised by some details: it’s hard to believe in a time where there were male soldiers, or that women didn’t have skeins prior to “the Cataclysm.” She thinks that a society run by men would be “more kind, more gentle, more loving.” Neil argues that current society is matriarchal, but that it doesn’t have to be—they should be able to find a more equal balance between the genders.