Dominion by Addie E Citchens review – Women’s prize-shortlisted portrait of patriarchy’s horrors

The violence of male entitlement is embodied in the charismatic son of a Mississippi pastor, in a sharp portrait of cruelty and inheritance ‘To woman he gave a womb, and to man he gave dominion’, that’s what I teach my boys,” the Rev Sabre Winfrey Jr tells his wife, Priscilla, midway through Addie E Citchens’s formidable Women’s prize-shortlisted debut novel, Dominion. In Citchens’s hands, that dominion is exercised not only through violence, but through charisma, piety and the banality of ma...

By Emma Loffhagen