The Testaments: Booker Prize Winner
A Novel
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4.5 • 3.8K Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE • A gripping return to Gilead, The Testaments exposes the regime’s inner decay through the intersecting stories of three women whose choices could ignite its downfall.
Now a Hulu Original series starring Ann Dowd, reprising her role as Aunt Lydia, Chase Infiniti as Agnes, and Lucy Halliday as Daisy.
The Testaments can be read on its own or as a sequel to Margaret Atwood’s classic, The Handmaid’s Tale.
More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three women converge, with potentially explosive results. Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by that of Aunt Lydia, whose complex past and uncertain future unfold in surprising and pivotal ways.
With The Testaments, Margaret Atwood opens up the innermost workings of Gilead, as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is and how far she will go for what she believes.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Margaret Atwood’s feverishly anticipated sequel to her 1985 bestseller, The Handmaid’s Tale, is an absolute triumph. The novel takes us back to Gilead, the theocratic hellscape where women are property and reproduction is the highest calling. Trouble is afoot, and Atwood provides three guides to help us navigate the upheaval: Aunt Lydia, whose regrets color her memoirlike narrative, and two young women whose fates intersect in an unexpected and gratifying way. Atwood’s storytelling prowess is on full display here, as is her sharp eye for witty cultural references: Each evening, Aunt Lydia visits the Schlafly Cafe for a soothing cup of warm milk. Exhilarating and hugely satisfying, The Testaments was 35 years in the making—and well worth the wait.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Atwood's confident, magnetic sequel to The Handmaid's Tale details the beginning of the end for Gilead, the authoritarian religion-touting dystopia where fertile single women (handmaids) live in sexual servitude. The novel opens in New England 15 years after the first novel ends. Aunt Lydia has become a renowned educator, an ally of Gilead's spy chief, and an archivist for Gilead's secrets. Ensconced in her library, Aunt Lydia recalls how she went from prisoner to collaborator during Gilead's early days. Now she is old and dying and ready for revenge. Her plan involves two teenagers. Gilead native Agnes Jemima is almost 13 when she learns her real mother was a runaway handmaid. Rather than marry, Agnes Jemima becomes an aunt-in-training. Sixteen-year-old Daisy in Toronto discovers she is the daughter of a runaway handmaid after the people she thought were her parents die in an explosion. Aunt Lydia brings the girls together under her tutelage, then sends them off to try to escape with Gilead's secrets. Since publication, The Handmaid's Tale has appeared as a movie, graphic novel, and popular miniseries. Atwood does not dwell on the franchise or current politics. Instead, she explores favorite themes of sisterhood, options for the disempowered, and freedom's irresistible draw. Atwood's eminently rewarding sequel revels in the energy of youth, the shrewdness of old age, and the vulnerabilities of repressive regimes.
Customer Reviews
Aunt Lydia does it again
Being a fan of watching Handmaids tales I couldn’t wait to read this. It was nice to see Hannah and Nicole meet. The story explained Aunt Lydia more which made me not hate her.
Frightening apt
I hate spoilers but I feel I must make an important point. Roe was overturned in 2022 bringing Texas women to their knees in trying to obtain medical care for pregnancies that did not have good outlooks. What is truly terrifying is this book was copyrighted in 2019, and this is a sentence straight from this book, “Nothing could be done, he’d said piously, because there had still been a fetal heart beat.” This was in relation to helping a woman who was septic with infection.
And this is still happening in Texas even today. Disgusting.
But the book is really really good.
Riveting.
Atwood is such an incredible writer. I could not stop reading. The NetFlex series does not do it justice, though it is riveting as well!