Previews

Read of the month

The Testaments

Margaret Atwood

Chatto & Windus, $48

In the 34 years since The Handmaid’s Tale took the literary world by storm, Margaret Atwood has fielded countless queries from readers asking what happened next. Even the author had to concede the questions were fair enough. After all, she’d left heroine Offred on the brink: armed men had stormed her house – but were they coming to set the handmaid free from the totalitarian state of Gilead or was she about to become yet another victim of the regime? In the much-awaited The Testaments, we get our answers.

For fans of the, there’s no need to disregard the second and third seasons of the show here, because most of the action in takes place 15 years after the end of the first book.