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In the world of the near future, who will control womens bodies?Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead. She may leave the home of the Commander and his wife once a day to walk to food markets whose signs are now pictures instead of words because women are no longer allowed to read. She must lie on her back once a month and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, because in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable.Offred can remember the days before, when she lived and made love with her husband Luke; when she played with and protected her daughter; when she had a job, money of her own, and access to knowledge. But all of that is gone now....Funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing, The Handmaid's Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

"A gripping suspense tale, THE HANDMAID'S TALE is an allegory of what results from a politics based on misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism. What makes the novel so terrifying is that Gilead both is and is not the world we know....The depth and complexity of Atwood's critique of contemporary society are stunning....[A] stark, even gruesome book, but it does not yield to despair and neither does its author."

Cathy N. Davidson, Ms., May 1986

"If THE HANDMAID'S TALE doesn't scare one, doesn't wake one up, it must be because it has no satiric bite....The most conspicuous lack, in comparison with the classics of the fearsome-future genre, is the inability to imagine a language to match the changed face of common life....Characterization in general is weak..., which maybe makes it a poet's novel....It seems harsh to say again of a poet's novel--so hard to put down, in part so striking--that it lacks imagination, but that, I fear, is the problem."

Mary McCarthy, New York Times Book Review, 02/09/1986

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