The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood was a rare re-read for me. There's simply too many books to go over anything but the best. And Atwood is at her best in this science fiction/sociology novel. In a not-too-distant future, fertility rates are down so far that healthy women are captured, enslaved, and used as surrogate mothers to the elite leaders of a strange, religion-based regime. The woman are stripped of their names and their personalities, becoming, in fact, simply a walking womb. Offred is the main character, and her will to find the resistance movement that she believes must exist, is a driving force - but will she succeed, or end up hanging as an enemy of the state? Offred's story is told in the present, and also in effective flash-backs, which are disturbingly close to our time now, reinforcing the feeling that this could happen to the reader. A true classic.