A women’s alternative to the Booker

If you’re only going to read the winner of one fiction prize each year, the Women’s Prize for Fiction will always be your best bet. Each year the prize honours one female author whose novel has made the greatest impact on the literary world in the past year. The prize began when in 1991 it was noticed that despite 60% of the novels published at the time being written by women, the Booker prize shortlist didn’t contain any female authors that year. Previous winners include Ali Smith’s How to Be Both and Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. If you’re looking for a book which marries discussion of complex issues like gender, race, sexuality, and death, with engaging narrative, then the Women’s Prize is the right place to look.

This year’s winner: The Power by Naomi Alderman

“It doesn’t matter that she shouldn’t, that she never would. What matters is that she could, if she wanted. The power to hurt is a kind of wealth.”

This is the sentence that sums up the spirit of Naomi Alderman’s novel The Power the best for me. It is a novel which, at its centre, is about the relationship between gender and power. When I first read the novel this year it changed the way I thought about the world in a way no book has for years. It tells the story of four protagonists in a world where massive social and political upheaval is taking place. Women have suddenly developed the power of electrocution, shifting the balance between the genders. Women take political office, start new religions, and become the leaders of gangs and mafias. Beyond that, men and women must begin to adjust to the new relationship dynamics between them, changing the way they relate to one another forever.

What I love about this novel is that Alderman refuses to take the easy way out in her narrative. The world doesn’t become an instantly more peaceful or gentle place because women are in charge; the power dynamics between men and women remain nuanced, and those with power still abuse it. The Power also deals with what it’s like not to fit into the gender constraints of society and the pain that can cause, but also shows characters finding comfort and camaraderie in being different.

I think that the genius in this book is that it shocks us, without anything novel actually happening. There has always been a gender based power imbalance, and the imbalance has always affected the way men and women treat each other. However, the way Alderman reverses this power dynamic forces the readers to see the misogyny in our society with brand new eyes. All the struggles men face in the book are also faced by women in parts of our real world: from sexual abuse and harassment, to being unable to leave the house without a guardian. Here Alderman is asking why this no longer shocks us.

This novel really asks difficult questions of its reader: Is it possible for a society to truly be equal when there is a difference in physical power between the genders? Are women naturally the more peaceful gender as they have often been assumed to be? Is it possible to have power without abusing it? Alderman answers these questions with sophistication and nuance that the reader will find refreshing.

This isn’t a book where the concept out shines the writing, in fact quite the opposite: Alderman delivers on everything she promises. The Power is likely to take the place it deserves as a modern classic, and one of the most important books about gender of our generation.

The Women’s Prize 2017 runners up: my favourite pick

A Women’s Prize runner up for 2017 and another one of my favourite books of the year is Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo. Set in Nigeria in the 1980s and 90s, Stay With Me is about a childless woman’s search for meaning in a culture where motherhood is everything. It also examines how infertility affects the main character’s relationship with her husband and his family, who eventually persuade her husband to find a second wife.

For me, Stay With Me has the charm and character of novels like Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (another Women’s Prize winner), but also provides the thrill of a crime drama, with many twist and turns throughout. Like Ngozie Adichie, Adebayo is able to skilfully transport the reader to the vibrant world of the main character, contrasting the bright and bustling city in which she lives with the loneliness and desperation infertility can cause. This is a novel which I think will help many people understand the pain of infertility, as well as make women who cannot have children feel understood and heard in a world where their stories are often ignored.