The Handmaids Tale : New Windmills Series - Margaret Atwood

The Handmaids Tale

New Windmills Series

By: Margaret Atwood

Hardcover | 8 February 1993 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover


$50.80

or 4 interest-free payments of $12.70 with

 or 

Aims to ship in 15 to 25 business days

When will this arrive by?
Enter delivery postcode to estimate

Margaret Atwood's feminist 1984 is an excellent A-level text. As one of the few women left with functioning ovaries Offred has only one role in the Republic of Gilead: to breed. If she deviates she will be hanged at the wall like all dissenters. But Offred still remembers how life used to be and determines to find a way out. Set by AQA A, WJEC and OCR at A-level Age 16+
Industry Reviews
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead - a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile. Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful - if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband - dead - and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur - something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization - this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest - and long on cynicism - it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence. Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse. (Kirkus Reviews)

New Windmills Series

I Am David : New Windmills Series - Anne Holm

RRP $45.75

$44.50

Things Fall Apart : New Windmills Series - Chinua Achebe
Gangsta Rap : New Windmills Series - Benjamin Zephariah
The Machine Gunners : New Windmills Series - Robert Westhall
Pride And Prejudice : New Windmills Series - Jane Austen
Kensuke's Kingdom : New Windmills Series - Michael Morpurgo
The Handmaids Tale : New Windmills Series - Margaret Atwood
Other Side of Truth : New Windmills Series - Beverley Naidoo
Don't Make Me Laugh : New Windmills Series - David Kitchen
Tales With a Twist : New Windmills Series - Mike Royston
Men & Gods : New Windmills Series - Rex Warner