Eleven Percent
A Novel
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- 99,00 kr
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- 99,00 kr
Publisher Description
An inverse The Handmaid’s Tale that asks: What if women took over the world?
"A pretty wild book!"—Margaret E. Atwood, tweet
"Emotionally enthralling and intellectually stimulating." —Booklist
It is the New Time, a time not so different from our own except that the men are gone. All but eleven percent of them, that is, the minimum required to avoid inbreeding. But they are safely under lock and key in “spa” centers for women’s pleasure (trained by amazons to fulfill all desires) and procreation. A few women protest that the males should be treated better – more space, better food, but all agree that testosterone cannot be allowed to roam free. The old patriarchal cities are crumbling, becoming overgrown; people now live in “round communities.” But if you prefer the slum, that’s okay too. Religion has survived, sort of: women priestesses speak in tongues, inspired by snake venom, as apples are passed around to the congregation. But all social engineering has its costs...
Four different lives intersect: Medea, a tiny, long-haired witch and snake whisperer; Wicca, a young priestess who excelled at the “self-pleasuring” curriculum in school and has lost her pregnant lover; Eva, a doctor working in a spa center, and Silence, who lives in an almost abandoned convent. Each will discover the cracks in this women's paradise.
Provocative, irreverent, and completely riveting, Eleven Percent—a #1 bestseller in Denmark—is the first novel to appear in English by celebrated Danish author Maren Uthaug.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Uthaug, who is of Norwegian, Sami, and Danish descent, makes her English-language debut with a provocative dystopian tale of a world dominated by women, where biological males are kept sedated in spa centers and allowed to exist only for the purpose of procreation and women's pleasure. The novel alternates among the viewpoints of four women. There's Medea, a witch living in a small convent who keeps venomous snakes for elixirs and is secretly raising a male child she took in as an infant. Her lover, Christian priestess Wicca, uses Medea's snakes in salvation rituals. Silence, a member of Medea's convent, atones for her long-ago betrayal of a friend, while Eva, who works at one of the spa centers, harbors her own secret. After Medea's boy, now seven, flees from the convent, the four women search for him, and Uthaug reveals the surprising connections between them. The speculative elements are peppered with bizarre and lurid details, such as an underclass of sex-worker "manladies" who sew toy penises onto their bodies, but readers will be immersed in this world by the time the satisfying conclusion rolls around. It's an intriguing thought experiment about the consequences of gender oppression.
