The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, is here

It’s one of the most tightly controlled book releases this year, but a blinder at Amazon has seen the book leak out early.

When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of Margaret Atwood’s book The Handmaid’s Tale, readers had no way of knowing what lay ahead — freedom, prison or death.

The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to Atwood’s dystopian novel, picks up more than 15 years after Offred stepped into the unknown.

Despite not being released until next Tuesday, the novel has already landed Atwood on the Booker Prize shortlist, and Bruce Miller, the showrunner of Hulu and MGM’s Emmy-winning TV adaptation based on the first book, has exclusively told Time that he will develop the sequel into a TV series.

Some fans even accidentally received early copies of the book overnight after Amazon broke the release date embargo and shipped out “a small number of copies”. The official release date remains September 10.

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According to a video Atwood posted on Twitter last November, the inspiration for The Testaments stems from “the world we’ve been living in” and everything readers have “ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings”.

Yes indeed to those who asked: I’m writing a sequel to The #HandmaidsTale. #TheTestaments is set 15 years after Offred’s final scene and is narrated by three female characters. It will be published in Sept 2019. More details: https://t.co/e1umh5FwpX pic.twitter.com/pePp0zpuif

— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) November 28, 2018

While details of The Testaments’ plot have been kept under lock and key, The Guardianhas published an exclusive extract of the sequel.

The novel won’t be told from the perspective of Offred like the first book, but instead will unfold through the overlapping narratives of three other women connected to Gilead. One, a young woman (Offred’s older daughter, known as Hannah in the TV series) raised in the oppressive society; another a Canadian teenager who learns she was actually born there; and Aunt Lydia, a major villain in both the show and the original novel.

Gilead is still an oppressive patriarchal republic, and according to the New York Times’ review of the book, the main narrative is centred on a mole who is “working with the Mayday resistance to help bring down the evil empire.”

The Testaments by Margaret Atwood – read the exclusive first extract https://t.co/QG2rmLd9XA

— The Guardian (@guardian) September 4, 2019

Atwood started drafting the sequel before the TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale (which is screened locally on SBS/SBS On Demand)premiered in April 2017, sending the then 32-year-old novel soaring back to the bestseller list.

While the first season stuck closely to many of the major arcs in the original novel — even ending with the image of Offred boarding the mysterious van — the TV writers have had to develop the narrative beyond Atwood’s story in the following two seasons, with a fourth series ser to be released next year.

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Atwood worked closely with Miller and his team, advising on story plans, details about Gilead and aspects like character names.

According to reviews, there’s plenty onscreen that The Testaments either ignores or contradicts, but it holds onto the central belief of the show and original novel, which is that

Gilead is a dystopia of hope and it will be destroyed by individual and extraordinary beings.

A scene from Hulu’s adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Atwood, who wrote The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984, did not include details in the novel “that had not already happened” somewhere, some time in history, or any technology “not already available.”

While the horrors of Gilead’s male-centred theocracy remain, they are less shocking in Atwood’s sequel, likely because they’re now so well-known. The series has portrayed everything from ritualised rapes and finger amputations to Taser assaults and excised eyeballs.

As for Offred, while she is at the centre of the TV series, portrayed by Elisabeth Moss, she makes only the briefest of appearances in The Testaments, but has been declared a terrorist and enemy of the state.

Atwood will launch The Testaments with a live interview onstage in London next Tuesday, which will stream to 1300 cinemas around the world.

Originally published as The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, is here