ELEVEN PERCENT

A female-dominated future offers its own problems in Danish author Uthaug’s provocative novel.

Uthaug’s first novel to be published in English imagines a time several centuries in the future when 11% of men—enough to keep the genetic pool sufficiently varied—are allowed to survive infancy, only to be kept captive and heavily medicated. Definitely not for the squeamish, the novel follows four women who have trouble dealing with the system in which they have been raised. Medea and Silence are witches who live in a convent with an elderly “sister” and a nameless 7-year-old boy they have raised in secret. Wicca—Medea’s lover and a priest in the now-matriarchal Christian church, in which cobras play a critical role—worries that she won’t satisfy the mothers who have raised her to follow in their footsteps as priests. And Eva is a doctor with a potentially damning secret she’s held since childhood. Though it’s not clear whether the rest of the world has also been transformed, or just Denmark and its Scandinavian neighbors, Uthaug builds her brave new world with care and confidence, gradually revealing a civilization in which all new buildings must be round or ovoid, testosterone is viewed as poison, “manladies” with silicone penises service customers in the dodgier parts of Copenhagen, and self-designated Amazons are assigned to teach the captive males their varied sexual “jobs.” Uthaug’s worldbuilding is more convincing than her plot-making, which tends to long, repetitive flashbacks and little forward momentum, and her frequent, colorful descriptions of the use of bodily effluvia of all sorts to make cakes and other delicacies may leave readers without an appetite. She certainly can’t be faulted for subtlety.

A funhouse mirror revealing the drawbacks of turning patriarchy upside down.