(There is no airdate yet for season 4.) In its cliffhanger ending-the show has long outstripped Atwood’s original conclusion-we see the heroine Offred, played by the astounding Elisabeth Moss, wounded and losing consciousness. The page-turner is delivered just as Handmaid mania threatens to subside, in the aftermath of last month’s season 3 finale of the hit Hulu series.

The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s long-awaited sequel to her 1985 dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, takes place some fifteen years after that Reagan-era masterpiece leaves off, updating us not with another lush portrait of life under fascism, but with a hybrid marvel-a spy thriller and a fictive memoir about survival, complicity, self-delusion, and sabotage in a time kind of like a stylized now. They are girls who’d rather wear sack cloth and carry a cattle prod, become enforcers and executioners in their own right, than marry a Commander of the regime. The stench reaches the dorms of novice Aunts. Refugees stream over the border into Canada, while in the totalitarian country’s quiet heartland, the corpses of alleged heretics, thieves, and disobedient Handmaids-state-owned reproductive slaves in scarlet dresses-hang from hooks drilled into what was once Harvard’s historic Johnston Gate. Gilead has been beaten back by the Republic of Texas, but the war with California rages on. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we've been living in.' Margaret Atwood 'The literary event of the year.' Guardian 'A savage and beautiful novel, and it speaks to us today, all around the world, with particular conviction and power.The Testaments, by Margaret Atwood, Nan A. 'Dear Readers: Everything you've ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. As Atwood unfolds The Testaments, she opens up the innermost workings of Gilead as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third voice: a woman who wields power through the ruthless accumulation and deployment of secrets. Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results. More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. Now she brings the iconic story to a dramatic conclusion in this riveting sequel. Margaret Atwood's dystopian masterpiece, The Handmaid's Tale, is a modern classic.

The testaments