The Handmaid's Tale

Description

'Compulsively readable' Daily Telegraph The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function- to breed . If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs. . . . .

Margaret Atwood (Author) Margaret Atwood is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was a global number one bestseller and won the Booker Prize. In 2020 she published Dearly, her first collection of poetry for a decade. Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Valerie Martin (Introducer) Valerie Martin is the author of Set in Motion, A Recent Martyr, Alexandra, The Consolation of Nature and Other Stories and Mary Reilly, which has recently been made into a film. Born in Missouri and raised in New Orleans, she has taught at various universities including Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts. She lives in Massachusetts and Rome.

'Moving, vivid and terrifying. I only hope it's not prophetic' Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Listener 'The Handmaid's Tale is both a superlative exercise in science fiction and a profoundly felt moral story' Angela Carter 'Our of a narrative shadowed by terror, gleam sharp perceptions, brilliant intense images and sardonic wit' Peter Kemp, Independent 'The images of brilliant emptiness are one of the most striking aspects of this novel about totalitarian blindness...the effect is chilling' Linda Taylor, Sunday Times 'Powerful...admirable' Robert Irwin, Time Out