Hyped latest release is no fictional testament to Atwood’s dystopian vision
Nominated for the Booker Prize shortlist before its publication, the release of novelist’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale has been highly anticipated
12 September 2019 - 05:05
A looped video clip of vast machinery in operation greeted journalists arriving at the British Library for the Margaret Atwood press conference. It suggested a hellish world of relentless mechanisation, a future of nightmarish bondage where automatons ruled over mere mortals.
But this was no fictional dystopia, this was the real world, and now. And these were printing presses churning out copies of Atwood’s hotly anticipated new novel, The Testaments. Whole forests were swallowed in seconds. The handmaid industrial complex had arrived, slouching towards Gilead to be born...
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