Written in 1985, Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale imagines a near future quite different than the one George Orwell had predicted for the previous year, but her novel has joined 1984 as one of the classics of dystopian literature. Her vision is of a United States transformed into the Republic of Gilead, a fundamentalist state in which women, and their increasingly rare reproductive capacities, are strictly controlled. It's an imagined world memorable both for Atwood's vivid anger and her surprising tenderness.
