The Testaments

The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s 2019 novel, the long awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale that arrived more than three decades after the original. The book won the Booker Prize that year, jointly with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, and reached an enormous audience on the back of the popular success of the Hulu television adaptation of the original novel. Atwood was eighty when the book came out, and she had spent years insisting she had no plans to write a sequel before changing her mind.

The Testaments is set fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale. The Republic of Gilead, the totalitarian theocratic state that took over much of what was once the United States, is still in power but has begun to show the cracks that authoritarian regimes typically develop with time. The novel is told through three rotating narrators. Aunt Lydia, the iconic enforcer of the original novel, here revealed as a much more complicated figure than her appearance in The Handmaid’s Tale suggested. Agnes, a young woman raised inside Gilead in the household of a powerful Commander. And Daisy, a teenage girl raised in Canada by adoptive parents who turn out to have been hiding considerably more about her origins than they ever admitted.

The three narratives slowly converge across the novel as the connections between the women become clear and as the larger plot involving the smuggling of intelligence out of Gilead reaches its climax. Atwood gives the novel a more conventional thriller structure than the slow burn dystopian dread of the original, and some critics found the increased plot momentum a loss while others found it a welcome opening up of the world she had built.

For readers of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments is essential. The reveals about Aunt Lydia’s actual position inside the regime, about how Gilead has been falling apart from the inside, and about the eventual fate of the Republic, give long term fans the resolution the original novel had refused to provide. For new readers, the book can be read on its own but rewards prior familiarity with the original.