More than fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown at the close of The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood returns to Gilead—not through the eyes of a handmaid this time, but through three very different women whose testimonies gradually converge. The theocratic republic is beginning to rot from within, and its secrets are becoming harder to keep.
One narrator is Aunt Lydia, the formidable architect of Gilead's regime for women, whose private account reveals how she rose to power and what she has been quietly building beneath its surface. The others are two young women coming of age on opposite sides of the border—one raised inside Gilead's suffocating expectations, the other in Canada, increasingly drawn toward the resistance. As their stories interlock, the machinery of the regime and the seeds of its undoing come into focus.
Winner of the Booker Prize, The Testaments is both a gripping thriller and a searching sequel that answers long-standing questions about how Gilead worked—and how it might fall. Atwood trades some of the earlier novel's claustrophobic dread for propulsive intrigue and a hard-won note of hope.