In a near-future New England, environmental collapse and plummeting birth rates have given way to the Republic of Gilead, a fundamentalist theocracy that has overthrown the United States government. Women have lost their money, their jobs, the right to read, and their own names. The few who remain fertile are conscripted as Handmaids and assigned to the households of powerful Commanders, where once a month they must submit to a ritual intended to produce a child.
Offred is one of them. She serves in the home of the Commander and his wife, Serena Joy, a former televangelist who campaigned for the order that now confines her. Offred remembers a husband, a daughter, a job and a name of her own, and those memories — along with a forbidden attachment to the household's chauffeur, Nick, and the whispered existence of a resistance — become their own quiet acts of defiance.
This is the authorised graphic novel adaptation of Margaret Atwood's 1985 classic, adapted and illustrated by Canadian artist Renée Nault and published in March 2019. Nault condenses the novel into 240 pages of watercolour, working in a restricted palette that sets the Handmaids' red against the muted greys and greens of Gilead, so that the regime's colour-coding of women becomes the visual logic of the book itself.