Margaret Atwood projects us into a less-than-brave new world, an outlandish yet wholly believable space populated by a cast of memorable characters.
Margaret Atwood’s spellbinding sequel to The Handmaid's Tale was inspired by readers’ responses to the first book and ‘the world we’ve been living in’.
‘And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.’ When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, what lay ahead for her? Freedom or prison? Life or death? The Testaments picks up the story 15 years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.
Margaret Atwood
About the Author
Margaret Atwood is the world-renowned author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry and critical essays.Margaret Atwood on The Testaments
This one has more closure. Someone said, oh, it’s such a happy ending, well, not for everyone in the story. It is a more positive ending than one might have expected at certain points of the story. I’m a World War II baby. Things looked pretty dark in 1942.’
Read the full interview here.
Margaret Atwood
© Rosdiana Ciaravolo/GettyWhat the judges said
‘It is a savage and beautiful novel that speaks to us today with conviction and power. The bar is set unusually high for Atwood. She soars.’
What the critics said
Ron Charles, The Washington Post
‘The Testaments opens in Gilead about 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, but it’s an entirely different novel in form and tone. Inevitably, the details are less shocking […] Atwood responds to the challenge of that familiarity by giving us the narrator we least expect: Aunt Lydia. It’s a brilliant strategic move that turns the world of Gilead inside out.’
Barbara Vandenburgh, USA Today
‘The Testaments is worthy of the literary classic it continues. That’s thanks in part to Atwood’s capacity to surprise, even writing in a universe we think we know so well. And she starts by making us root for dastardly Aunt Lydia […] Atwood is patient in unpacking Aunt Lydia’s intentions and executing her plan, and does so with a dash of keen mordant wit.’
Sophie Gilbert, The Atlantic
‘The witnesses she portrays in her fiction aren’t saviors; they are (or hope to be) survivors, people constrained and compromised by circumstances, and especially worth listening to for that very reason. The Testaments highlights this fact by making a more loaded demand than its predecessor did—that readers place themselves in the seat of an oppressor, not one of the subjugated […] In Aunt Lydia—whose dry humor, ironic grandiosity, and contrarian instincts, not to mention her fame, call to mind Atwood’s own—Atwood continues to blur stark villain-victim distinctions.’
Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times
‘Before we get lost in all the analysis and pontificating and political connect-the-dots surrounding Margaret Atwood’s new novel, let’s remember this: Atwood is a hell of a writer, and, whatever else it may be, The Testaments is a splendid tale, splendidly told.’
Dinah Birch, The Times Literary Supplement
‘Though The Testaments is primarily a political novel, ideological commitment is not its only characteristic. It is also a thriller, with a fast-paced plot featuring many entangled concealments and dramatic confrontations […] Of course the women write with a chiselled articulacy that could hardly be an authentic reflection of their circumstances: the blunt and shapely sentences and sly observations are all Atwood. But the fact that there is only ever one voice in this novel is not necessarily a weakness. Atwood’s writing is at its incisive best throughout this novel.’
Other nominated books by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood’s 2000 Booker winner is a multilayered drama that weaves its narrative threads across past and present, fiction and reality.
Margaret Atwood’s captivating historical fiction about the notorious 1843 murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery.
In Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed novel, an artist returning to her home city is consumed by images of the lavish cruelties she endured there as a child.
In Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopian classic, nothing happens ‘that hasn’t already happened at some time or another’.
