“ Moving, vivid and terrifying. I only hope it's not prophetic ”
Conor Cruise O'Brien, The Listener
“ The Handmaid's Tale is both a superlative exercise in science fiction and a profoundly felt moral story ”
Angela Carter
“ Out of a narrative shadowed by terror, gleam sharp perceptions, brilliant intense images and sardonic wit ”
Peter Kemp, Independent
“ The images of brilliant emptiness are one of the most striking aspects of this novel about totalitarian blindness...the effect is chilling ”
Linda Taylor, Sunday Times
“ Powerful...admirable ”
Robert Irwin, Time Out
Paperback
9780099511663
December 1, 2010
Vintage Classics
336 pages
Hardback
9781784708238
October 30, 2017
Vintage
336 pages
Paperback
9781784873189
May 22, 2017
Vintage Classics
336 pages
Paperback
9781784871444
October 3, 2016
Vintage Children's Classics
512 pages
Hardback
9781841593012
September 15, 2006
Everyman
392 pages
Paperback
9780099740919
October 25, 1996
Vintage
320 pages
Audio CD
9781786141637
May 7, 2019
Audiobooks
Audio Download
9781473560925
April 30, 2019
Vintage Digital
EBook
9781473546967
August 4, 2016
Vintage Digital
512 pages
EBook
9781446485477
May 15, 2012
Vintage Digital
336 pages
We slept in what had once been the gymnasium. The floor was of varnished wood, with stripes and circles painted on it, for the games that were formerly played there; the hoops for the basketball nets were still in place, though the nets were gone. A balcony ran around the room, for the spectators, and I thought I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls, felt-skirted as I knew from pictures, later in mini-skirts, then pants, then in one earring, spiky green-streaked hair. Dances would have been held there; the music lingered, a palimpsest of unheard sound, style upon style, an undercurrent of drums, a forlorn wail, garlands made of tissue-paper flowers, cardboard devils, a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light.
There was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only the pictures flickering over lifting flesh.
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Elisabeth Moss, star of the hit TV show The Handmaid’s Tale, has narrated the audiobook edition of Margaret Atwood’s classic novel.
