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In a startling departure from her previous novels ( Lady Oracle , Surfacing ), respected Canadian poet and novelist Atwood presents here a fable of the near future. In the Republic of Gilead, formerly the United States, far-right Schlafly/Falwell-type ideals have been carried to extremes in the monotheocratic government. The resulting society is a feminists nightmare: women are strictly controlled, unable to have jobs or money and assigned to various classes: the chaste, childless Wives; the housekeeping Marthas; and the reproductive Handmaids, who turn their offspring over to the "morally fit" Wives. The tale is told by Offred (read: "of Fred"), a Handmaid who recalls the past and tells how the chilling society came to be. This powerful, memorable novel is highly recommended for most libraries. BOMC featured alternate. Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

"A novel that brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections between politics and sex . . . Just as the world of Orwells 1984 gripped our imaginations, so will the world of Atwoods handmaid!" �The Washington Post Book World

"The Handmaids Tale deserves the highest praise." �San Francisco Chronicle

"Atwood takes many trends which exist today and stretches them to their logical and chilling conclusions . . . An excellent novel about the directions our lives are taking . . . Read it while its still allowed." �Houston Chronicle

"Splendid." �Newsweek

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 Handmaids Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

Offered 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 where signs are now in 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, Offered and other Handmaids are only valued if their ovaries are viable. Offered can remember the years 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 Handmaids Tale is at once scathing satire, dire warning, and tour de force.

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in thirty-five countries, is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. In addition to The Handmaid�s Tale, her novels include Cat�s Eye, short-listed for the 1989 Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; The Blind Assassin, winner of the 2000 Booker Prize; Oryx and Crake, short-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize; The Year of the Flood; and her most recent, MaddAddam. She is the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Innovator�s Award, and lives in Toronto with the writer Graeme Gibson.

www.margaretatwood.ca

from the Introduction

In the spring of 1984 I began to write a novel that was not initially called The Handmaid�s Tale. I wrote in long hand, mostly on yellow legal notepads, then transcribed my almost illegible scrawlings using a huge German-keyboard manual typewriter that I�d rented.

The keyboard was German because I was living in West Berlin, which was still encircled by the Berlin Wall: the Soviet empire was still strongly in place and was not to crumble for another five years. Every Sunday the East German air force made sonic booms to remind us of how close they were. During my visits to several countries behind the Iron Curtain�Czechoslovakia, East Germany�I experienced the wariness, the feeling of being spied on, the silences, the changes of subject, the oblique ways in which people might convey information, and these had an influence on what I was writing. So did the repurposed buildings. This used to belong to . . . But then they disappeared. I heard such stories many times.

Having been born in 1939 and come to consciousness during World War II, I knew that established orders could vanish overnight. Change could also be as fast as lightning. It can�t happen here could not be depended on: anything could happen anywhere, given the circumstances.

By 1984, I�d been avoiding my novel for a year or two. It seemed to me a risky venture. I�d read extensively in science fiction, speculative fiction, utopias and dystopias ever since my high school years in the 1950s, but I�d never written such a book. Was I up to it? The form was strewn with pitfalls, among them a tendency to sermonize, a veering into allegory, and a lack of plausibility. If I was to create an imaginary garden, I wanted the toads in it to be real. One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the �nightmare� of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the devil.

Back in 1984, the main premise seemed�even to me�fairly outrageous. Would I be able to persuade readers that the United States of America had suffered a coup that had transformed an erstwhile liberal democracy into a literal-minded theocratic dictatorship? In the book, the Constitution and Congress are no longer: the Republic of Gilead is built on a foundation of the seventeenth-century Puritan roots that have always lain beneath the modern-day America we thought we knew.

The immediate location of the book is Cambridge, Massachusetts, home of Harvard University, now a leading liberal educational institution but once a Puritan theological seminary. The Secret Service of Gilead is located in the Widener Library, where I had spent many hours in the stacks, researching my New England ancestors as well as the Salem witchcraft trials. Would some people be affronted by the use of the Harvard wall as a display area for the bodies of the executed? (They were.)

In the novel, the population is shrinking due to a toxic environment, and the ability to have viable babies is at a premium. (In today�s real world, studies in China are now showing a sharp fertility decline in Chinese men.) Under totalitarianisms�or indeed in any sharply hierarchical society�the ruling class monopolizes valuable things, so the elite of the regime arrange to have fertile females assigned to them as Handmaids. The biblical precedent is the story of Jacob and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and their two handmaids. One man, four women, twelve sons�but the handmaids could not claim the sons. They belonged to the respective wives.

And so the tale unfolds. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Margaret Atwoods 1985 novel has seen several adaptations--a Hollywood film, an opera, and an unabridged audiobook, as well as this dramatization produced for BBC Radio 4. Not only is it well acted by an American cast (it wouldnt have worked with British voices), but the directors also make excellent use of subtle audio cues. For example, newscasts in the background nicely convey the culture of this dystopian society in which the few women who can bear children are made into surrogates. Though its just three hours, this coherent production retains much of the flavor of the original novel. D.B. � AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine-- Copyright � AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.