The Testaments

The Testaments is a novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, published in 2019. It is the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale and was a joint winner of the Booker Prize that year.

The book is set about fifteen years after the events of the earlier novel and is narrated in three voices. Aunt Lydia, who appeared in The Handmaid's Tale as one of the regime's enforcers, gives her own account of how Gilead was built and what she has been doing inside it; Agnes Jemima is a young woman brought up in a Gilead household as a future wife; and Daisy is a teenager living in Canada who finds out that her history is not what she has been told. Atwood keeps the three accounts separate for most of the novel, and part of the reading is working out how they are connected. The regime's workings are described from inside its schools and marriages rather than from the underground, and the way it uses women against one another is the subject the three narrators circle from different positions.

Atwood wrote the book after decades of readers asking what happened next, and it uses the same documentary framing as the earlier novel, with the accounts presented as material recovered later.