In Leni Zumas’s intense, beautifully crafted novel, abortion has been outlawed across the US. Further draconian policies follow: laws against the disposal of fertilised embryos and the Every Child Needs Two act, which forbids adoption by single parents. These are intended to imprison women in outgrown roles, but they are hardly impossible to imagine in the America of 2018. The new laws affect the four women who narrate Red Clocks in different ways, but all of them feel the pinch.

Risky, to try to out-Atwood Atwood, but the book on which this models itself is The Robber Bride. Like that novel, Red Clocks is far more driven by characterisation, and its exploration of the bonds between women, than by its plot, which comes down to relatively predictable binary choices. Roberta is a single woman trying to conceive, and many clocks are ticking against her; Mattie, her teenage student, has an unwanted baby in her womb; Gin, an unabashed witch, finds herself on trial for a crime she did not commit; and Susan, a former lawyer, feels trapped in her marriage and lost in motherhood. They are weird, passionate, unforgettable characters.

In a place that is neither mind nor heart, or both at once, she wants an ashy line down the center of a round belly; she wants nausea [...] spider veins at the knee backs, loose stomach skin, lowered breasts. Affronts to vanity worn as badges of the ultimate accomplishment.
[...] does the desire come from some creaturely place, pre-civilised, some biological throb that floods her bloodways with the message Make more of yourself! To repeat, not to improve.

The dialogue is so quick and multilayered as to take one’s breath away. The rank uselessness of the men who appear in this novel crystallises in their words, in the way they contradict their words with their actions. The powerlessness and fury of women find an outlet in their spoken protests, their pleas to be heard by idiotic doctors, husbands who cannot see their marriages unravelling. Zumas elucidates, in virtuosic prose, the struggle to be valued running like a power line under every incarnation of feminism. Her talent is electric. Get ready for a shock.

• Red Clocks by Leni Zumas (Borough Press, £16.99). To order a copy for £14.44, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.