From the mistress of foreshadowing
‘Saturated in science, the novel is simultaneously alive with literary resonances … superlatively gripping and remarkably imagined’
- The Sunday Times
Shortlisted for both the Man Booker and Orange prizes, Margaret Atwood’s novel – a prophetic tale of a human race all but wiped out by plague – is threaded with dark humour. Following The Folio Society’s gorgeous and much-admired edition of The Handmaid’s Tale, this new volume sizzles with the dangerous heat and underlying menace of a ravaged America. Using a carefully selected pastel palette, award-winning illustrator Harriet Lee-Merrion has produced a series of quietly unsettling artworks that convey societal collapse with an eerie sense of detachment, while the binding design reflects the scientific foundation of Atwood’s narrative.
In a foreword specially commissioned for our edition, Atwood returns to the novel she wrote more than 15 years ago, and to the questions it raised – ones that remain equally pertinent today: ‘How slippery is the slope? … Who’s got the will to stop us?’ There are no answers, she concludes, but her prophetic tale creeps dangerously closer to reality as the years pass.