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The Handmaid’s Tale

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What to expect

Shortlisted for Audiobook of the Year at the British Book Awards 2020.

Winner of Best Audiobook (Fiction) at the New York Festival Radio Awards 2020.

Read by Elisabeth Moss, star of the hit Channel 4 TV series.


** THE SUNDAY TIMES NO. 1 BESTSELLER **

Discover the dystopian novel that started a phenomenon.

Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead. She is placed in the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford – her assigned name, Offred, means ‘of Fred’. She has only one function: to breed. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude to repopulate a devastated world, she will be hanged. Yet even a repressive state cannot eradicate hope and desire.

As she recalls her pre-revolution life in flashbacks, Offred must navigate through the terrifying landscape of torture and persecution in the present day, and between two men upon which her future hangs.

'A fantastic, chilling story. And so powerfully feminist' Bernadine Evaristo

‘As relevant today as it was when Atwood wrote it’ Guardian

©2011 O W Toad Ltd (P)2019 Penguin Audio

Critics Review

A fantastic, chilling story. And so powerfully feminist
Bernadine Evaristo, author of GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER
Compulsively readable
Daily Telegraph
Out of a narrative shadowed by terror, gleam sharp perceptions, brilliant intense images and sardonic wit
Independent
The Handmaid's Tale is both a superlative exercise in science fiction and a profoundly felt moral story
Angela Carter
Moving, vivid and terrifying. I only hope it's not prophetic
The Listener
The images of brilliant emptiness are one of the most striking aspects of this novel about totalitarian blindness...the effect is chilling
Sunday Times
Powerful...admirable
Time Out
It's hard to believe it is 25 years since it was first published, but its freshness, its anger and its disciplined, taut prose have grown more admirable in the intervening years... Atwood's novel was an ingenious enterprise that showed, with out hysteria, the real dangers to women of closing their eyes to patriarchal oppression
Independent on Sunday
Turned 25 this year and...worth re-reading. As you grow, such books grow with you
The Times, Christmas round up
Fiercely political and bleak, yet witting and wise...this novel seems ever more vital in the present day
Observer

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