Teenage girls across the world begin to develop the ability to shoot electricity out of their hands.
I know, I don't need to write anything else - you want to read it already, right? It's just an amazing premise for a novel! In The Power by Naomi Alderman, we see what happens when girls discover that they are becoming physically more powerful than men. The electricity they can channel can cause incredible pain, and while this certainly doesn't make females invincible, it does a really good job of leveling the playing field. Once men no longer can physcially overpower a woman, gender dynamics across the world change forever.
Alderman's mentor, Margaret Atwood, is the author of one of the most influential novels about gender dynamics, The Handmaid's Tale (have you seen the Hulu series yet? So good!), and her influence can be seen in Alderman's book in the way the world Alderman has created is fully developed and totally different from ours, yet completely relevant to our society today. The Power shows us how this biological marvel affects different people across the globe over a period of time, including a teenage girl who uses the power to escape an abusive foster parent, a shrewd politician who uses the phenomenon to her advantage in her career, a Nigerian man whose fascination with the evolution of the power leads him around the world as a reporter, and many more. Alderman's image of a world run by women, altered as they are with this power, is both fantastic and terrifying, and will likely stick with you long after you read about it.