Naomi Alderman Books in Order

Naomi Alderman was born in London in 1974 and grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family. Her early life in north London, shaped by faith, family ritual, and close community, later gave her material for fiction that asks how private desire rubs against public rules.

She attended South Hampstead High School, then read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Lincoln College, Oxford. The mix of ideas, argument, and systems of power would keep turning up in her work, whether the story involved ancient Judea, a university house, or a new global technology.

After Oxford, Alderman took jobs outside publishing glamour. She worked as a PA for a children's publisher and edited publications for an international law firm, including time in New York. While there, she found fan communities and started thinking seriously about the kinds of stories she wanted to tell.

A visit to the United States after September 11 helped bring a change in direction. She left the law-firm job, returned to England, and completed an MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, where the beginnings of Disobedience took shape.

Published in 2006, Disobedience follows Ronit, a rabbi's daughter returning from New York to the Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon after her father's death. The novel puts faith, sexuality, loyalty, and family pressure in the same tight space. It won the Orange Award for New Writers, and Alderman was later named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year.

That was the start.

The Lessons moves to Oxford, where a lonely student becomes entangled with a wealthy, volatile group of friends. In The Liars' Gospel, Alderman goes back nearly two thousand years, telling the story of the Jewish preacher Yehoshuah through several people caught in the politics and violence of Roman-occupied Judea. Both books focus on people who inherit rules, stories, and expectations that do not quite fit.

Alderman also writes for games. From 2004 to 2007, she was lead writer for the alternate-reality game Perplex City. In 2011, she and Adrian Hon began building Zombies, Run!, a fitness game and audio adventure that turns a run into a mission through a zombie-filled world. She later expanded that setting into the playful survival guide Zombies, Run!.

Her novel The Power brought those interests in fear, gender, technology, and social change together on a much larger scale. In it, teenage girls develop the ability to generate electricity, and the shift quickly reshapes homes, governments, religions, and wars. The book won the 2017 Women's Prize for Fiction and was adapted for television.

Later work includes The Future, a fast-moving story about tech billionaires, survivalism, and a looming disaster, and The Strangers, which blends grief with a strange ecological discovery in England. Alderman is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and lives in London. Her books keep returning to the same useful question: what happens when the rules everyone accepts suddenly change?