In the near future, a fundamentalist regime called the Republic of Gilead has overthrown the United States government. In response to plummeting birth rates, the new order strips women of their rights, their money, their names, and their autonomy. The few remaining fertile women are conscripted as Handmaids and assigned to powerful households to bear children for the ruling Commanders and their wives.
Offred is one such Handmaid, serving in the home of the Commander and his wife Serena Joy. Through her quiet, watchful narration, she reconstructs the ordinary life that was taken from her — a husband, a daughter, a job, a name — and records the ceremonies, surveillance, and small rebellions that define her present. As she navigates the dangers of forbidden connection and a nascent resistance, she holds onto memory itself as a form of defiance.
First published in 1985, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is one of the defining dystopian novels of the twentieth century, a chilling meditation on gender, power, complicity, and reproductive control that has only grown in resonance. It inspired an acclaimed television adaptation and the 2019 sequel The Testaments.