The book has now become a pop culture phenomenon, a political rallying cry and a hit TV series. The sequel, titled "The Testaments," takes place roughly 15 years after the end of "The Handmaid's Tale," when Offred is led into a black van
TORONTO — Margaret Atwood wasn’t sure she had a “Handmaid’s Tale” sequel in her, even as fans clamored for one.
“What they were begging for was a continuation in the voice of Offred, which I would not have been able to do,” she said over tea and juice at a cafe near her home. “You can climb the Empire State Building barehanded once. When you try again, you’ll fall off. It was a wildly improbable thing to have done in the first place. That voice was there. She said her thing. There’s nothing you can really add in her voice.”
But a few years ago, Atwood started plotting a way to continue her 1985 dystopian classic about the women of Gilead, a religious autocracy in what was formerly the United States, where fertile women are subjected to ritualized rape and forced to bear children for the upper class citizens.
Between then and now, “The Handmaid’s Tale” became a pop culture phenomenon, a political rallying cry and a hit television series on Hulu, starring Elisabeth Moss as Offred, the narrator. The English-language edition of the novel has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide. Women dressed as handmaids have flooded Congress and state capitols to protest new restrictions on reproductive rights. Expectations for Atwood’s sequel, which this month was named to the Booker Prize shortlist ahead of its release on Tuesday, are stratospheric.
Adding to those pressures is that a “Handmaid’s Tale” sequel effectively exists already. The TV adaptation, created by Bruce Miller, has extended Offred’s saga beyond the scope of the novel. So Atwood and Miller had to calibrate plot and character developments in the show, so that the series didn’t contradict her sequel, or vice versa.
“Margaret offered me more restrictions, and I gave her more information,” Miller said in an interview. “I had to be careful about where I was going and what I was doing. She controls the world.”
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