“ Compulsively readable ”
Daily Telegraph
“ Out of a narrative shadowed by terror, gleam sharp perceptions, brilliant intense images and sardonic wit ”
Peter Kemp, Independent
“ The Handmaid's Tale is both a superlative exercise in science fiction and a profoundly felt moral story ”
Angela Carter
“ Moving, vivid and terrifying. I only hope it's not prophetic ”
Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Listener
“ The images of brilliant emptiness are one of the most striking aspects of this novel about totalitarian blindness...the effect is chilling ”
Linda Taylor, Sunday Times
“ Powerful...admirable ”
Robert Irwin, Time Out
“ It's hard to believe it is 25 years since it was first published, but its freshness, its anger and its disciplined, taut prose have grown more admirable in the intervening years... Atwood's novel was an ingenious enterprise that showed, with out hysteria, the real dangers to women of closing their eyes to patriarchal ”
Lesley McDowell, Independent on Sunday
“ Turned 25 this year and...worth re-reading. As you grow, such books grow with you ”
Erica Wagner, The Times, Christmas round up
“ Fiercely political and bleak, yet witting and wise...this novel seems ever more vital in the present day ”
Observer
“ The mother of all feminist dystopian novels. ”
Sarra Manning, Red
“ The novel satirises the strain of evangelical puritanism in American culture and the objectification and control of women’s bodies. It is more broadly a contemporary myth of despotic power, and how such power deforms those who are subjected to it. ”
Tim Adams, Observer
“ One of Atwood’s finest pieces of work serves as a great reminder of what humanity is capable of. ”
Hannah Dunn, Red
“ Margaret Atwood is a wry and perceptive observer of society as well as an original storyteller ”
Cecilia Heyes, Psychologist
“ Brilliantly conceived and executed, this powerful evocation of twenty-first century America gives full rein to Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit and astute perception ”
Essence
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We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light.
There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.
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