Who, after all, is Donald Trump if not Commander Waterford without the charm? And I can’t be the only one who, watching the Trump crowd’s chants of “Lock her up!” or “Send her back!”, found herself thinking of taser-wielding Aunt Lydia and the handmaids’ cries of “Her fault!” when one of their number “confesses” to having been gang-raped? With the implacable rise of the Christian right in the US, never has it felt more urgent for women to guard both their bodies and their reproductive systems against (some) men and the state. Still, no one could have guessed the extent to which recent history (as well as a superb TV offshoot) would bring it eerily, terrifyingly back into focus. The newly born Republic of Gilead, with its abuses and abominations, its hideously misogynistic vocabulary and gruesomely rationalised constraints, was just about far enough from our own world to seem beguiling, but also close enough to feel like a wake-up call. Now Atwood has returned to the world of Gilead with The Testaments, a new novel that takes place around 15 years after the events of the first.T hose of us lucky enough to read The Handmaid’s Tale back when it first appeared in 1985 will remember the shock of a novel that felt both claustrophobically precise and shatteringly prescient.

The Handmaid's Tale season 1 finale reached this same point almost beat-for-beat, but with two more seasons under its belt, it had to devise its own methods for continuing Offred's story. It's an uncertain ending for the character, since we don't know whether June makes it to safety, is taken into even greater danger, or perhaps even both.

First published in 1985, The Handmaid's Tale, which takes place in a dystopian United States that's been overtaken by a totalitarian theocracy and finds woman forced into servitude and child-bearing, ended on a rather ambiguous note.Īt the end of The Handmaid's Tale book, a pregnant Offred (whose real name is June, as revealed by the TV series) is taken away from the Waterfords' home and into a van, never to be seen again. Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale book has finally revealed what happened to June, a,k.a Offred, after the ending of the original novel.

Margaret atwood the testaments