Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
About the book
More than fifteen years after The Handmaid's Tale, Gilead still controls women's education, work and marriages. Agnes grows up in Boston as a Commander's daughter, while Daisy attends school in Toronto and helps at her parents' secondhand clothing shop. Inside Gilead, Aunt Lydia writes a secret testimony from the headquarters of the Aunts, the women charged with enforcing obedience. Their three accounts converge around secrets that could threaten the regime's hold on power.
Reader notes
Brisk and darkly funny, the dystopian sequel alternates first-person testimonies and develops into a political thriller. It can be read on its own. Sexual abuse, coercion and suicide remain serious subjects even as the plot gathers speed.
How it reads
Writing style
Direct · Witty
Tone
Dark · Tense · Unsettling
Structure
Braided · Multiple timelines
Driven by
Character · Ideas · Plot
Point of view
First person · Multiple viewpoints
Setting
Boston · Gilead · Toronto
Reading complexity
Writing
3 / 5
Ideas
3 / 5
Structure
3 / 5
Background knowledge
2 / 5
About this profile
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Writing
How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas
How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure
How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge
Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity
Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.
What is the order of books in The Handmaid's Tale?
1. The Handmaid's Tale; 2. The Testaments.
How long does it take to read The Testaments?
About 9 hours at 50 pages an hour, based on the 448-page Anchor edition. Dense books can take longer.
About the author
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian novelist, poet, and critic whose work moves between speculative fiction, historical narrative, satire, and mythic revision. She often builds stories from voices that are constrained, compromised, or competing, making narration itself part of the struggle over power. Her prose can be spare and atmospheric or densely layered, with dry wit sharpening its attention to gender, class, language, and political control. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Offred’s account renders an authoritarian theocracy through the restricted knowledge of a woman assigned to reproductive service. Alias Grace turns interviews with a convicted servant into a contest between measured testimony and a psychiatrist’s demand for explanation. Blind Assassin expands this method through memoir, newspaper reports, and a novel within the novel, each layer revising the others. Elsewhere, Atwood directs the same scrutiny toward biotechnology and social collapse in Oryx and Crake, and toward inherited myth in The Penelopiad, where Penelope’s defense is interrupted by the maids’ disruptive chorus.
