(This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017. For the rest of the list, click here.)

THE POWER

By Naomi Alderman

386 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $26.

THERE IS A MONUMENT in Ottawa’s Minto Park dedicated to the memory of women killed by men. As with most monuments in Canada’s capital, its inscription is bilingual, and meaning exists in a tense tangle between translations. In French, it says à la mémoire de toutes les femmes qui ont subi jusqu’à la mort la violence des hommes. In English, it reads to honor and to grieve all women abused and murdered by men. It’s difficult to say, at a glance, whether one is a translation of the other, or whether they are simply two statements, separate but related, written in stone, shedding different lights on the women they commemorate.

This has everything to do with Naomi Alderman’s fourth novel, “The Power.”

Alderman (who also created the popular apps “Zombies, Run!” and “The Walk,” and in 2013 was among Granta’s 20 best young British novelists) imagines our present moment — with our history, our wars, our gender politics — complicated by the sudden widespread manifestation of “electrostatic power” in women. Young girls wake up one morning with the ability to generate powerful electric shocks from their bodies, having developed specialized muscles — called “skeins” — at their collarbones, which they can flex to deliver anything from mild stings to lethal jolts of electricity. The power varies in its intensity but is almost uniform in its distribution to anyone with two X chromosomes, and women vary in their capacity to control and direct it, but the result is still a vast, systemic upheaval of gender dynamics across the globe.

Alderman explores this change through the eyes of Roxy, the daughter of a British drug baron; Margot, mayor of an unnamed city in the United States; Allie, a brown girl in an abusive foster home in Alabama; and Tunde, a young Nigerian journalist. Through Tunde, we get glimpses into what’s happening around the world; through Allie, we see the entrenchment of power around a new religion centering on women and lightning; through Margot, we see how politics proceed hand in hand with the military-industrial complex; through Roxy, we see how organized crime leverages social shifts into business opportunities. All their perspectives converge on the newly declared nation of Bessapara, previously Moldova, where the former sex-trafficking capital of the world becomes a staging ground for the new world order.