Titled The Testaments, Margaret Atwood will publish the sequel to her feminist dystopian novel in September 2019. The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985.
“Dear Readers,” wrote Atwood in a press release announcing the book on 27 November, “Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.”
The Handmaid’s Tale is the story of the society of Gilead, and a woman Offred living in this dystopian and totalitarian society in America, struggling to survive in a time when women possess meagre rights, and are explicitly not allowed to pursue education, or even learn how to write. The novel has become a cult classic, and last year the streaming service Hulu released a TV series by the same name based on it (though with variations). Elisabeth Moss plays the lead character Offred.
“As a society, we’ve never needed Margaret Atwood more,” said Becky Hardie, deputy publishing director at Chatto & Windus. “The end of The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the most brilliantly ambiguous endings in literature. I cannot wait to find out what’s been going on in Atwood’s Gilead – and what that might tell us about our own times.”
The novel is an essential cultural classic on female oppression. The costume of the handmaids used in the TV series was donned by protesters in the USA rallying against a US Supreme Court judge charged with sexual harassment, revealing how deeply the show has seeped into the cultural consciousness of the women in America and beyond, who connect with the adversarial society of the novel which is skewed against people of their gender.
The Testaments will be set 15 years after the final scene in the novel, and is awaited eagerly by fans, new and old alike.
