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The Handmaid's Tale

Average rating: 4/5

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The Handmaid's Tale

by Margaret Atwood

McClelland & Stewart | September 6, 2011 | Trade Paperback

In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate "Handmaids" under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred's persistent memories of life in the "time before" and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood's devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid's Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.


From the Hardcover edition.

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Reviews

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      helpful to you?

    Rating: 2/5

    Ok

    melii90

    6 weeks ago

    I had to read this book for school the first 100 pages were long and brutal to read. Nothing happens and it is just plain boring. After that the story gets moving we get to learn more about the characters and something actually happens, some action. It was an okay read I love all the symbols and all the themes that are present in this story but I do not like her style of writting I am more into teen books, so this was completely off what I usually read.

    • Was this review
      helpful to you?

    Rating: 4/5

    Powerful and provocative dystopian fiction

    Matthew McCarthy

    2 years ago

    The Handmaid's Tale is the third of Atwood's novels that I've picked up within the past year and a half, and I can see why this novel probably picks up the most recognition amongst her other works. While I can't comment on the Blind Assassin -- a novel still sitting on my shelf, waiting to be read -- both Alias Grace and The Edible Woman were novels that I thoroughly enjoyed. While The Edible Woman gives us a quirky black comedy, Alias Grace gives us a thought-provoking historical narrative. Conversely, The Handmaid's Tale deals with the fragmented memories of Offred -- a "farmed" woman (a Handmaid) only valued for her viable ovaries in a haunting patriarchal totalitarian state.

    While I won't give away too much of what the novel is about, it is told in a way that makes you want to read as voraciously as possible to find out what actually ends up happening. I've heard people say Atwood at times is predictable, but nothing in this novel is easy to guess. It may deal with the same well-trodden themes found in Atwood novels, but really I didn't expect anything completely new when reading the jacket.

    The Handmaid's Tale may not be a totally "new" idea; in our present day the landscape of fiction is almost overwhelmed with the dystopian, Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale easily ranks in the upper echelon of what is available.

    This reviewer also recommends:
    • Was this review
      helpful to you?

    Rating: 5/5

    Not What I Expected...

    Alea

    3 years ago

    We had been given this book to read in Grade 11 and I blew it off as many classmates did, but never returned the book to the teacher. After I graduated High School, I looked on my shelf and still had it.

    Man, I should have read it in Grade 11. It's such a beautiful book. I found it hard to get into in the beginning, but having nothing else to read that day, I forced myself to continue and found myself captivated in a truley amazing story.

    A must read, not only because it's Atwood, but because it's a story of a few lives you'll always remember.

    Comments on this review:
    Diana Reid

    Please, anyone who still has books from high school: bring them back. As a high school teacher, my book budget has been slashed yearly until just getting replacements for books "lost" by students is too expensive. There are 4 great novels I can't teach to my students, because we have fewer than 20 copies left. Better still, find a sale on a novel you love:one of those 1 or $2 sales, and donate 30-60 dollars to your local school in the form of a class set of novels to soothe the guilt of overdue books. As I write this, I am building my own class sets of novels that I love, simply because we haven't the funds to take a chance on new literature. Neil Gaiman's Mirrormask, Edmund Rostand's Cyrano , etc. are all being bought out of pocket.

    • Was this review
      helpful to you?
    Not Impressed

    Rating: 3/5

    Bunch of babbel

    Not Impressed

    12 years ago

    I just finished reading the book and although it was intresting I wouldn't read it again. I didn't find it disturbing or realistc and the ending was far from good. The book was just babbel with no real meaning.

    Comments on this review:
    Susie Barbosa

    I agree. I read it, and found the middle was a little long and meaningless. It was a decent read, but I wouldn't read it again

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From the Publisher

In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate "Handmaids" under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred's persistent memories of life in the "time before" and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood's devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid's Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Nominated for the first ever Man Booker International Prize representing the best writers in contemporary fiction, Margaret Atwood is the author of more than 35 internationally acclaimed works of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her numerous awards include the Governor General's Award for The Handmaid's Tale, and The Giller Prize and Italian Premio Mondello for Alias Grace. The Handmaid's Tale, Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, and Oryx and Crake were all shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, which she won with The Blind Assassin. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and has been awarded the Norwegian Order of Literary Merit and the French Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres among many others; she is a Foreign Honorary Member for Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in Toronto.


From the Paperback edition.

Trade Paperback

368 Pages, 5.2 x 8 x 0.95 in

September 6, 2011

McClelland & Stewart

English


0771008791
9780771008795

From the Critics

"A taut thriller, a psychological study, a play on words.…A rich and complex book."
-New York Times

"Atwood has peered behind the curtain into some of the darkest, most secret, yet oddly erotic corners of the mind, and the result is a fascinating, wonderfully written, and disturbing cautionary tale."
-Toronto Sun

"A novel that will both chill and caution readers and which may challenge everyday assumptions.…It is an imaginative accomplishment of a high order. . . . "
-London Free Press

"Moving, vivid and terrifying. I only hope it is not prophetic."
-Conor Cruise O'Brien

"A novel that brilliantly illuminates some of the darker interconnections of politics and sex.…Satisfying, disturbing and compelling."
-Washington Post

"The most poetically satisfying and intense of all Atwood's novels."
-Maclean's

"It deserves an honored place on the small shelf of cautionary tales that have entered modern folklore - a place next to, and by no means inferior to, Brave New World and 1984."
-Publishers Weekly

"Deserves the highest praise."
-San Francisco Chronicle

"In The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood has written the most chilling cautionary novel of the century."
-Phoenix Gazette

"Imaginative, even audacious, and conveys a chilling sense of fear and menace."
-Globe and Mail

"Margaret Atwood's novels tickle our deepest sexual and psychological fears. The Handmaid's Tale is a sly and beautifully crafted story about the fate of an ordinary woman caught off guard by extraordinary events. . . . A compelling fable of our time."
-Glamour

"This visionary novel, in which God and Government are joined, and America is run as a Puritanical Theocracy, can be read as a companion volume to Orwell's 1984 -its verso, in fact. It gives you the same degree of chill, even as it suggests the varieties of tyrannical experience; it evokes the same kind of horror even as its mordant wit makes you smile."
-E. L. Doctorow


From the Hardcover edition.

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