It is around five-thousand years in the future. Neil Adam Armon, a historian, cultural archivist, and member of the Men Writers Association, sends off a manuscript to an editor, Naomi Alderman. His cover letter to the manuscript cautions Alderman not to expect a conventional dry-as-dust history of the time leading up to the event known only as The Cataclysm. This was the culminating moment some ten years after women first realized the power of the skein, a muscle tissue that gives women the power to send jolts of electricity through their fingertips. Records of The Cataclysm are understandably vague, Armon cautions his editor. But his research into archeological artifacts and what few written records survived allow him the leeway to recreate this “hybrid piece,” a “novelization” of this tempestuous era for a contemporary audience. The manuscript focuses on four characters, only one of whom, the revered Mother Eve, is believed to be historically validated. The account, he says almost apologetically, is “plausible” rather than accurate. 

Roxy Monke, the 14-year old daughter of a powerful London underworld crime boss, is terrified. Hooded thugs have broken into her home.