The Handmaid’s Tale, the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood envisaging a hellish dystopia where the US is ruled by an ultra-far-right regime that treats women as chattels, has rocketed to the top of the bestseller charts after the UK broadcast of the first episode of the TV adaptation.
Channel 4 aired the debut episode of the series, starring Elisabeth Moss and Joseph Fiennes, at 9pm on Sunday, and within hours the paperback of the Canadian author’s novel had reached number one in the Amazon charts.
The show first aired on the US streaming service Hulu a month ago, giving the book a spike in sales in the US.
The adaptation, which follows Offred (Moss), a woman assigned the role of “handmaid” – forced to endure sex with one of the high-ups in the new American republic of Gilead, in the midst of a fertility crisis in which most women were unable to conceive a child – had already been building a new following in the first months of Donald Trump’s presidency and a number of policies that eerily mirror Atwood’s plot.
Charlotte Knight, editor at Vintage Classics, which publishes The Handmaid’s Tale in the UK, said the book “has for a long time been much-loved by readers, and has been a consistent bestseller on our Vintage Classics list”.
She added: “At the advent of the Trump presidency we saw an extra boost in sales, as it was one of a handful of enduring and brilliant dystopias that readers were turning to at a time of political uncertainty. We were delighted to see that the recent TV adaptation had provided an extra fillip.
“The show has generated a real word-of-mouth buzz because the book is so compulsive, vivid and frightening. It has led to a new generation of readers discovering The Handmaid’s Tale and recommending it to others, including celebrities – Emma Watson has recently picked it for her book club, Our Shared Shelf.”
The Republic of Gilead takes over America in a coup and imposes a totalitarian Christian-based theocracy where women become breeding machines for the ruling classes, or, if they are infertile, are given roles as domestic servants or “Marthas”.
As a handmaid, Moss’s character loses her given name, June, from the time before the coup and is re-designated Offred – literally“of Fred”, the name of her owner, the commander (played by Fiennes). The commander’s wife, Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) is a former TV evangelist whose own story will be expanded upon from Atwood’s novel in the 10-part TV series.
The handmaids wear red robes and nun-style white wimples – an outfit adopted by a group of women in March who staged a protest at the Texas Senate chambers against two bills that effectively ban second-trimester abortions in the state.
