The Handmaid's Tale: Introduction by Valerie Martin (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series) (Hardcover)
I was so excited to find that The Handmaid's Tale made it on this year's (2018) Great American Reads List! Margaret Atwood's beautifully crafted book describes female sexuality, the need for love, and the dangers of theocratic society. Told from first-person perspective of the handmaid Offred, Atwood's novel is gripping, heartbreaking, and thought-provoking. I enjoyed every minute of it. Yay, distopian literature!
— Abby WalkerOffred 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.
Atwood has won numerous awards including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2019 she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
"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