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The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

ISBN: 0449212602
ISBN-13: 9780449212608
Format: Paperback

Summary

In this futuristic fantasy, the Republic of Gilead-formerly the United States-is a fundamentalist regime that has reduced women to a state of servitude and suppressed all civil rights. The protagonist, a woman called Offred, becomes the Handmaid of the Commander, expected to bear him a child in exchange for her freedom. Old enough to remember life before the revolution, Offred resists the new order and becomes involved in an underground resistance movement. Atwood's novel was a best seller and became the basis for a popular movie.

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Media Reviews

"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.

"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

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published date: 1989
Size: 4.25 x 6.75 inches
Weight: 0.4 pounds

Publisher's Notes

"Splendid."NEWSWEEKIt is the world of the near future, and Offred is a Handmaid in the home of the Commander and his wife. She is allowed out once a day to the food market, she is not permitted to read, and she is hoping the Commander makes her pregnant, because she is only valued if her ovaries are viable. Offred can remember the years before, when she was an independent woman, had a job of her own, a husband and child. But all of that is gone now...everything has changed."Deserves the highest praise."SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Other Editions

Hardcover - Houghton Mifflin (1986) - from $1.00
Paperback - Ballantine Books (1989) - from $1.00

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Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

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