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Revision as of 11:43, 31 March 2020
, 11:43, 31 March 2020no edit summary
'''JOINT WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2019'''
Finally! Almost forty years on, we have a sequel to [[The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood|The Handmaid's Tale]]. I don't want to tell you too much about the plot because it's a novel that is entirely plot -driven. Suffice it to say that ''The Testaments'' takes place fifteen years later, fifteen years after Offred gets into a van, not knowing what will happen next. It's told by three narrators: Aunt Lydia, who is secretly writing her memoirs in Ardua Hall; Agnes, a girl brought up in Gilead with the expectation she will marry a commander; Daisy, a rebellious teenage girl in Canada who knows of Gilead only from school lessons and its Pearl Girl missionaries who occasionally call into the store owned by her parents......
How are these women connected? And what does it mean for Gilead? And that's all you're getting!
It's not perfect. The escape that takes place in the latter half of the book has a bit of the Keystone Cops about it at the outset and remains equally improbable throughout. And I felt the death of one character was elided, which missed a great opportunity for an emotional connection in a book filled with hard-to-love characters. But I'm not going to nitpick. We wanted to see where Atwood would go with the world she created and she's shown us. I left ''The Testaments'' both unsettled and unrestful ''and'' satiated and satisfied and I think that may well have been the intention.
Of course, recommended.Atwood looks at the relevance of the past, rather than the future, to today in [[Alias Grace]] - a clever, intricate novel with an unforgettable unreliable narrator. [[The Carhullan Army by Sarah Hall]] is a rich, heady dystopian novel in which childbirth is discouraged, not celebrated, and women are compulsorily fitted with a contraceptive coil.
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{{waterstones|titleurl=the-testaments|author=margaret-atwood|ISBN13=9781784742324http://tidd.ly/7780988e}}
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