The Testaments has arrived just as Americans have started to feel that the end may be imminent: access to abortion is being strangled at state level, as indeed are basic women’s health services that tend to be provided in the same facilities. In the US, however – and despite a dismissive review in the New York Times by Mary McCarthy – it was more likely to be: ‘How long have we got?’” In the UK, which had had its Oliver Cromwell moment some centuries ago and was in no mood to repeat it, the reaction was along the lines of, ‘Jolly good yarn’. In 2012, Atwood wrote about the latter, “The book came out in the UK in February 1986, and in the United States at the same time. The book dances with the present moment – in the Anglosphere but particularly in North America – in a way that The Handmaid’s Tale did not. For all of us.” It adds, ominously, “Before you enter their world, you might want to arm yourself with these thoughts: Knowledge is power and History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”

“You hold in your hands a dangerous weapon loaded with the secrets of three women from Gilead,” announces the dustjacket of The Testaments, “They are risking their lives for you. The universe of The Handmaid’s Tale – the 1984 novel, the 1990 film, the 2017 television series – bleeds in and out of the real, and her publishers are cannily aware of it. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.” “Dear Readers,” she wrote recently on social media, “Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book.

Thirty-five years and much hype later, Atwood has given us a sequel, The Testaments. They appear at courthouses and state capitols as a warning from the near-future or a fiction which feels ever more like the present – and the truth.

The testament handmaid's tale