The Testaments
by Margaret Atwood
Summary
Fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid's Tale, Gilead is rotting from the inside. Three voices tell how it comes apart: Aunt Lydia, writing a secret history in the Ardua Hall library and rather enjoying her own ruthlessness; Agnes, raised inside Gilead and being prepared for marriage at thirteen; and Daisy, a teenager in Toronto who knows nothing about any of it.
Where the first novel was claustrophobic and offered no exit, this one is a thriller. It moves fast, it has a plot with a destination, and it answers questions the earlier book deliberately left open, which is exactly what some readers wanted and exactly what others thought was a mistake.
Aunt Lydia is the reason to read it. Atwood takes the first novel's most frightening figure and gives her a voice that is dry, self aware, entirely without self pity and very funny, and the account of how an ordinary judge becomes an architect of a theocracy is the most chilling thing here.
Read The Handmaid's Tale first, but do not expect its successor. This is a more conventional and more generous book, written by a writer in her eightieth year who had watched her earlier novel become a protest symbol and decided to give its world an ending.
It reads very fast, closer to a thriller than to literary fiction, and it is far less bleak than its predecessor. Whether that is a relief or a disappointment depends entirely on what you wanted The Handmaid's Tale to be.
Historical Context & Significance
The Testaments shared the Booker Prize in 2019 with Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, in defiance of the prize's own rules.
Ties had been banned after 1992, and the judges were instructed that they could not split the award. They deliberated for five hours, took a vote, failed to agree and declined to comply, escalating the matter to the chair of trustees before the shared result was announced. It was the third tie in the prize's history.
Atwood had already won in 2000 for The Blind Assassin, making this her second. She was seventy nine and was widely felt to have been rewarded partly for a career, which is part of why the shared prize drew criticism: the coverage skewed heavily toward her rather than toward Evaristo, who had made history in the same moment.
The sequel arrived at the height of the television adaptation's cultural reach, which shaped both its sales and its reception.