The Handmaid's Tale

In the near-future Republic of Gilead, a theocratic regime has stripped women of all rights and turned fertile women into reproductive servants. Offred remembers a different world and waits for her chance. Atwood’s chilling novel has never stopped being relevant.

Why Read This

The Handmaid’s Tale is the book that proved literary fiction and science fiction are not separate categories. Atwood (who famously prefers the term “speculative fiction”) built Gilead from elements that already exist: every atrocity in the novel has a historical precedent. That is what makes it so unsettling: it is not fantasy but extrapolation.

Where Butler uses time travel to look backward at slavery, Atwood uses dystopia to look forward at patriarchy. Both novels ask the same question: what happens when a society decides that certain people are not fully human? The Handmaid’s Tale answers it with a precision that makes the Hulu adaptation pale in comparison.

What to Expect

A first-person narrative in fragmented, poetic prose. The worldbuilding is revealed gradually. The tone is controlled and claustrophobic. Darkly funny in places. One of the most-read novels of the twenty-first century.