Why everyone's talking about The Power audiobook again - and the bold new voices that make this electric
The full-cast, re-recording of Naomi Alderman's iconic audiobook is electrifying...in more ways than one
There are plenty of reasons why Naomi Alderman will already feel like a familiar name (and voice) to you. Best known for her award-winning novel, The Power, she’s also written sharp, thoughtful forewords for books like The Testaments, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Careless People. Whether she’s writing fiction or cultural commentary, Alderman has a knack for blending wit with insight. She's a voice that you want in your ears as much as on the page.
To mark ten years since The Power was published (and nine since it won the Women’s Prize for Fiction), the novel has been brought to life all over again. With a full-cast re-recording, it’s shaping up to be one of the best audiobooks of the year. We caught up with Alderman to talk about revisiting the story a decade on, what’s changed (and what hasn’t) for women globally, and why audio feels like the perfect format for this electrifying tale.
If you’re on the hunt for the best audiobooks to add to your queue, or simply looking to dive into one of the best feminist novels with a fresh perspective, you’re in the right place. From Alderman’s own recommendations to behind-the-scenes insight, consider this your cue to clear some space on your reading (or listening) list.
Article continues belowThe Power by Naomi Alderman Audiobook: everything you need to know
If you’re yet to read The Power, you’re in for a treat. First published a decade ago, it imagines a world where teenage girls develop the ability to generate electric shocks and how that single shift in power ripples across societies, politics, and relationships. What begins as something small and almost curious quickly escalates into a global reckoning. Told through a cast of men and women, it’s a sharp, unsettling, and often darkly funny exploration of what power really does to people.
The novel’s impact didn’t stop on the page. It was adapted into a TV series by Amazon Prime Video, and now, many of that cast, alongside Naomi Alderman herself, have reunited for a full-cast audiobook. When I asked Alderman about the experience, she lit up: “I was so delighted that we got so many people from the TV show back…it was lovely to get all the gang together again.” She even lends her own voice to the narration, adding another layer of intimacy to a story she knows inside out.
That sense of immersion is exactly what makes this version so compelling. “You get all these beautiful performances and they go into you and become a part of you,” she told us. And it’s true. As each voice takes over, you’re pulled into different perspectives, different identities, different versions of power. And while the format might be new, Alderman is clear that the message isn’t outdated.
The Power Audiobook Ten Years After Publication
Even ten years on, Naomi Alderman is clear that The Power hasn’t lost its edge. “It still feels urgent…we still need to talk about these things,” she tells me. And as we get into it, you start to see why the story continues to land with such force.
Alderman describes the novel as working in two distinct halves. The first is almost playful in its provocation. “Come on,” she says, “how much fun would it be… if we, women, could electrocute people fully in the face? Would you not feel much more safe, much more able to live your life, and much more able to ask for what you wanted? Yes.” It’s a question that feels deliberately tempting. You can see how easily readers (or listeners) get swept up in that initial sense of possibility.
But then, she shifts it. And this is where the tone, both in the book and in our conversation, sharpens. “Then, in the second half, we ask: do we think all women are lovely?” she continues. “And if all women are not lovely, then what do we think would really happen?” It’s a reality check that reframes everything that came before it.
She’s candid about how that idea sits in today’s conversations around feminism. “I feel like these days, there is a form of feminism which says women are all great and all men are bad,” she says, before pushing back on it. Women, she argues, are no more inherently good than anyone else: “there are some really nice ones and some really horrible ones… you can’t tell what someone’s personality is like just by knowing what gender they are.” It’s a perspective that feels central to The Power and one that arguably lands even more sharply now than it did a decade ago.
That tension between then and now, fiction and reality, is exactly what makes revisiting the story feel like a wake-up call. Alderman agrees: “It’s only become more timely for me.” As we wrap up, she reflects on how the landscape has shifted since the book first came out. “It’s funny, because in the ten years since, the divisions have only become worse,” she says. “I used to feel that we were all in this together, but now we criticise each other.” And yet, for all that, she still believes in the value of stories like this, if only to remind us that we’re not alone in thinking the way we do.
The Power as an Audiobook
There’s a level of detail in the The Power audiobook that's particularly thoughtful and it shows how much Naomi Alderman cares about the listening experience. In the original text, there are visual elements woven into the narrative, but here, nothing gets lost in translation. She’s adapted those moments using audio description techniques, so you’re never left feeling like you’re missing part of the story.
Alderman explains, “I wrote it as if you are doing an audio-assisted tour for blind and partially sighted people in a museum,” she tells me. It’s a practical choice as much as a creative one, born out of her own frustration with audiobooks that send you elsewhere. “I really hate it when you’re listening and it says to look at a PDF,” she adds. “You think, ‘come on — I’m doing the washing up!’”
That same attention carries through into how she talks about audiobooks more broadly. She’s clearly a genuine fan of the format, and not in a vague, promotional way. “Audiobooks are so lovely to listen to,” she says, brushing aside the old “does it count as reading?” debate with a smile: “there’s a whole question about it, but yes, it absolutely is.” It’s a perspective that's proven in the audiobook production: you can hear how much care has gone into making it work as an audio-first experience.
In fact, the format has always been part of her writing process, whether she realised it or not. “I always hoped to turn it into an audiobook. I’m a very ‘ears’ person,” she explains. She reads everything out loud as a final edit and a way of testing rhythm, clarity, and flow. “You find out whether you’ve got the words right and whether you’ve got the sound right by reading them out loud,” she says, adding that, in a sense, she’s already made an audiobook of every book she’s written. Which makes this full-cast version of The Power a natural final step, or, as she puts it, “the final brick in the wall.”
If you like The Power Audiobook...
Luckily for us, Naomi Alderman is never short of a good recommendation. When we spoke about The Power as an audiobook, the conversation naturally turned to what else she’s listening to.
Over on her Substack, she regularly shares her thoughts, reflections, and the books she keeps coming back to. "I'm an audiobook fiend. I went straight from mum reading me books at bedtime, to getting tapes out of the library, to getting books on CD. I think I joined Audible in 2001."
So, if you’ve finished The Power and aren’t quite ready to leave that world behind, or you’re simply after your next great listen, consider this your shortcut to a Naomi-approved audiobook list.
This is Naomi's first recommendation. She describes it as "high concept science fiction." Naomi loves it in the same way that she applied her expert eye to The Power's audiobook. She says "in the physical book, they do this stuff with typography and they do some really nice work in the audiobook to reflect that."
For anyone who hasn't yet read this, Naomi promises "a treat in store." She describes this as "like the X Files but its about a government department that deals with creatures and beings where their special power is that you can't remember them and it does everything that you could possibly think of with that premise. At points its quite scary, quite sad, quite funny. It's good science fiction."
Naomi's final recommendation for fans of The Power is the audiobook of Bunny. "It's a great book, but it's also a fantastic audiobook," she says. It's a surreal thriller about the power of creativity when it comes from an emotionally authentic place.
Naomi couldn't resist two more audiobook recommendations, which aren't science fiction, but which have secured themselves places on her go-to audiobook shelf.
Naomi has listened to this so many times that she's lost count. She describes this as "stories from Stephen Grosz' psychotherapy world, stories from his couch. Every time I listen to it, I get a new insight. The first run though, you'll find interesting, but the next time, you'll find places to apply what you hear in your life."
"I'm almost certain you haven't heard of this," says Naomi, "it's the autobiography of this fascinating woman which she reads herself. She was a proper English aristocrat, a cousin of Esther Aster, so remembers staying in the family house with Winston Churchill, but she was also a successful comedy actress in the 1940s, 50s, 60s. When you see her you might recognise her. She's very funny and she's a forerunner of Victoria Wood."
So, if you’re in the mood to inject a little modern science fiction into your reading (or listening), the The Power audiobook is a very good place to start. It’s gripping, thought-provoking, and, in this format, even more immersive than before.
And it might be worth getting to it sooner rather than later. When we wrapped up, Naomi Alderman left me with a pretty compelling teaser: “I do keep thinking I should write a sequel,” she said. “Ten years feels like a good time… I would. I’ve already got another book I’m working on, but watch this space.”
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