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 male entitlement.

Set in the fictional town of Dominion, Mississippi, at the turn of the millennium, the novel follows the Winfreys, a prominent Black church family whose putative grandeur conceals a deep and hereditary decay. Sabre leads the largest congregation in the state from the pulpit of Seven Seals Baptist church, dispensing wisdom through sermons and local radio broadcasts, exuding the oily confidence of a man convinced that God speaks exclusively in his register. The longsuffering Priscilla writes those sermons, raises their five sons and silently maintains the machinery of his authority without ever receiving credit for it.