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A look at the near future presents the story of Offred, a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, once the United States, an oppressive world where women are no longer allowed to read and are valued only as long as they are viable for reproduction.

"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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