Our Better Natures by Sophie Ward review – reimagining Andrea Dworkin

Three women, two real and one fictional, seek social justice in an ambitious novel that explores power in 1970s AmericaWhat kind of justice can we have in a world driven by power? The actor turned writer Sophie Ward likes to fuel her novels with philosophical conundrums and set herself complex writerly challenges. Her ingenious, Booker-longlisted Love and Other Thought Experiments was structured around philosophical thought experiments, from Pascal’s Wager to Descartes’ Demon, with a chapter narrated by an ant living inside a character’s brain. The Schoolhouse explored the ethics of self-directed schooling and of policing in a complicated cross-period procedural. Now she turns her attention to questions of justice, freedom and power in the 1970s United States, with a tripartite structure bringing together three women – two real and one imagined.It’s 1971: the Manson Family have just been found guilty and hundreds of thousands are marching against the Vietnam war. In the Nethe