THE FUTURE, by Naomi AldermanThere are few figures in the Bible more cruelly evocative than Lot’s wife, who is transfigured into a pillar of salt for looking back at Sodom. Early in her novel, a woman is frozen to death with a chemical refrigerant made of paramagnetic salts: a Lot’s wife for the Information Age. Alderman’s Sodom is our own polarized, plutocratic world. Whether by divine will or not, “The Future” finds the earth barreling toward fiery destruction. But no such fever pitch is reached in Alderman’s new novel, whose outlook is decidedly more reformist than revolutionary.

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Persons: Naomi Alderman, Anna Akhmatova, “, Kurt Vonnegut, ” Naomi Alderman’s “, Zimri Nommik, Ellen Bywater, ”, Alderman, Harvey Weinstein, — Locations: United States