The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale is Margaret Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel, one of the most-assigned and most-banned American novels of the late twentieth century. In the Republic of Gilead, a Christian-theocratic regime that has replaced the United States after a coup that suspended the Constitution and killed the Congress, women have been stripped of bank accounts, employment, reading, and bodily autonomy. The protagonist, known to the reader only as Offred ("Of Fred," her assigned Commander), is a Handmaid: a class of fertile women assigned to wealthy Commanders to bear children for their barren Wives.

Atwood's discipline as a novelist is the part that makes the book work as more than a polemic. The narrative is composed almost entirely of Offred's interior voice and incremental recollection: she does not explain Gilead all at once, and the dystopian apparatus reveals itself only as she has reason to think about it. The Historical Notes appendix (set 200 years after Offred's narrative) reframes everything the reader has just read, and the framing has aged into being more relevant rather than less. Atwood famously wrote nothing in the book that had not happened at some point in human history.

Recommended as required dystopian-fiction reading, as the source for the long-running Hulu adaptation, and as one of the canonical late-twentieth-century American novels (alongside Beloved and Blood Meridian). The Claire Danes audiobook is excellent. Five stars without reservation. The 2019 sequel The Testaments is the natural next read and won the Booker Prize.