The American author on feminist utopias, surviving the apocalypse and who is really responsible for the scourge of electric bikes on the pavement
Sandra Newman’s fiction is characterised by audacious conceits, utopian thinking and apocalyptic fantasies. In her latest novel, The Men, every single human being born with a Y chromosome suddenly disappears one late August day, leaving a world inhabited solely by women. The American author imagines the feminist utopia that emerges – and is then threatened when online footage emerges of the vanished men marching through a barren landscape alongside freakish elephants and cats.
Newman’s five novels include The Country of Ice Cream Star and The Heavens, a daring time-travel fantasy that moves between Shakespeare’s England and 21st-century New York. She has also written four nonfiction books, including the memoir Changeling. She lives in New York.
