The Handmaid's Tale

Margaret Atwood · first published 1985 · ISBN 9780385490818

The Republic of Gilead has emerged from environmental collapse and plummeting birth rates, creating a theocratic state that reduces women to reproductive vessels. Offred moves through this brutal hierarchy as a handmaid in a commander's household, existing only to bear children for the ruling class. Atwood builds the regime's logic methodically, showing both its surface order and the fragile resistance beneath.