In this electrifying sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood answers the question that has tantalised readers for decades- What happened to Offred?
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, went back into the bestseller charts with the election of
Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance
against the disempowerment of women, and with the 2017 release of
the award-winning Channel 4 TV series.
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Booker Prize, the
Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the
Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the
PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. 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.
"The Testaments is Atwood at her best, in its mixture of
generosity, insight and control. The prose is adroit, direct,
beautifully turned. All over the reading world, the history books
are being opened to the next blank page and Atwood's name is
written at the top of it. To read this book is to feel the world
turning" -- Anne Enright * Guardian *
"I gobbled it down... Atwood has an incredible intellectual
nimbleness that challenges us constantly and poses the question
that lies like a pearl inside the shell of this frighteningly
readable novel "Before you sit in judgement, how would you behave
in Gilead?"" -- Allison Pearson * Sunday Telegraph *
"A cracker: urgent, moving and as tense as any thriller... there's
a darkly rebellious humour, ingenious wordplay and, of course,
chillingly timely warnings. Atwood is long overdue a Nobel" --
Hepzibah Anderson * Mail on Sunday *
"A plump, pacy, witty and tightly plotted page-turner that
transports us straight back to the dark heart of Gilead... Atwood
is on top form" -- Julie Myerson * Observer *
"Finding hope in a hopeless place, this is everything The
Handmaid's Tale fans wanted and more. Prepare to hold your breath
throughout, and to cry real tears at the end. My book of the year"
-- Kayleigh Dray * Stylist *
"It is an addictively readable, fastpaced adventure... the rhyme of
reality with fiction is loud and devastatingly clear... In The
Testaments, Atwood changes the emphasis of the plot, to strike a
note of optimism - a hopeful reminder that resistance is possible
and such regimes do eventually always fall" -- Holly Williams *
Independent *
"While unflinching in depicting horror and showing how complicity
enables the collapse of compassion, The Testaments is also a
clarion call to hope, resistance and activism... The Testaments is
a formidable achievement that will doubtless be read in decades to
come" -- Anita Sethi * i news *
"Ingenuity has always delighted Atwood. Here she revels in it...
The twists and turns of an extravagantly suspenseful final race for
freedom are done with bravura relish" -- Peter Kemp * Sunday Times
*
"The Testaments take us to a subtly altered Gilead and, in many
ways, a more hopeful one... a rallying cry for activism that argues
for the connectedness of societies and their peoples... Atwood's
task in returning to the world of her best-known work was a big
one, but the result is a success that more than justifies her
Booker prize shortlisting" -- Alex Clark * Guardian *
"The book may surprise readers who wondered, when the sequel was
announced, whether Atwood was making a mistake in returning to her
earlier work. She has said that The Testaments was inspired by
readers' questions about the inner workings of Gilead, and also by
"the world we've been living in." But it seems to have another aim
as well: to help us see more clearly the kinds of complicity
required for constructing a world like the one she had already
imagined, and the world we fear our own might become" -- Jia
Tolentino * New Yorker *
"The very act of writing or recording one's experiences, Atwood
argues, is "an act of hope."... in testifying to what they have
witnessed, Offred, Nicole, Agnes and, yes, Lydia are leaving behind
accounts that will challenge official Gileadean narratives, and in
doing so, they are standing up to the regime's determination to
silence women by telling their own stories in their own voices" --
Michiko Katutani * New York Times *
"Margaret Atwood saw it all coming" -- Lucy Feldman * Time *
"An era-defining masterpiece" * Waterstones.com *
"A work of brilliant and searing defiance" * MJ Hyland *
"Fluent, imaginative and provocative" -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on
Sunday *
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