The Handmaid’s Tale

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century — a prophetic dystopia set in the Republic of Gilead, a near-future America governed by a brutal theocratic regime that has stripped women of all rights and reduced a caste of fertile women to enforced reproductive servitude. Offred, the narrator, navigates her existence with a combination of compliance and inner resistance, telling her story as an act of witness and survival. Published in 1985, the novel has never been out of print and has never seemed less than urgently relevant — each decade finds new readers who recognise in Gilead a mirror for their own moment. Published by Vintage, this is essential for anyone interested in feminist literature, dystopian fiction, or the history of what the imagination can do when it confronts the worst possibilities of the present.