The Handmaid's Tale - Hardcover

Atwood, Margaret

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307264602 ISBN 13: 9780307264602

Publisher: Everyman's Library, 2006

Synopsis

A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time.

Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife. She may go out once a day to markets whose signs are now pictures because women are not allowed to read. She must pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, for in a time of declining birthrates her value lies in her fertility, and failure means exile to the dangerously polluted Colonies. Offred can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Now she navigates the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules.

Like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid's Tale has endured not only as a literary landmark but as a warning of a possible future that is still chillingly relevant.

About this title

From the Publisher:

"The most poetically satisfying and intense of all Atwood's novels."- Maclean's

"The Handmaid's Tale is in the honorable tradition of Brave New World and other warnings of dystopia. It's imaginative even audacious, and conveys a chilling sense of fear and menace."-The Globe and Mail

"The Handmaid's Tale brings out the very best in Atwood--moral vision, biting humor, and a poet's imagination."-Chatelaine

From the Back Cover:

Right-wing religious zealots have overthrown the United States government. America is now a fundamentalist police state where fertile young women known as Handmaids are forced to conceive children for the barren elite. Emma Campbell stars as Offred in this mesmerizing dramatization of Margaret Atwood's internationally best-selling novel. Assigned as an official breeder to the Commander (played by William B. Davis) and his jealous wife Serena Joy (Donna Goodhand), she mingles memories of her old life with dangerous thoughts of rebellion and love. Audacious and visionary, The Handmaid's Tale won the Governor General's Award for Fiction and was a runner-up for the Booker Prize.

About this edition

• Publisher: Everyman's Library
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0307264602
• ISBN 13: 9780307264602
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 350