The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood, a Canadian author, published The Handmaid's Tale in 1985. The novel is dystopian, and its setting is a near-future New England inside a patriarchal and totalitarian theonomic state called the Republic of Gilead, which has replaced the government of the United States. It is written as the first-person account of a woman known as Offred, who occupies the role of a Handmaid.

Gilead was built by the Sons of Jacob, a radical group inspired by the Old Testament, who assassinate the president and most of Congress and reform the country as a military dictatorship. The ruling class, the Commanders, deny women the right to read or own property and strip them of reproductive rights. Women considered able to bear children are assigned to Commanders' households for that purpose, and Offred's name is taken from the man she is assigned to.

Her account is mostly about ordinary things: the shopping, a bath, a card game with the Commander, the driver and the small acts of interest left in a life with no choices. She remembers having a job, a bank account and a daughter. The regime is policed through informers and through the Eyes, and the reader only sees what Offred chooses to tell.

Atwood based the novel's details on practices from recorded history, and she has said she avoided inventing anything that had not happened somewhere. The title echoes the form of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. A sequel, The Testaments, followed in 2019.