Fresh details about Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, have finally risen to the fore as the highly anticipated book itself hits shelves on September 10. Reviews are out, as is a lengthy new excerpt featured on NPR, offering an update on the state of Gilead and where June’s daughters ended up—according to Atwood, whose book is set on a separate timeline from that of Hulu’s Emmy-winning Handmaid’s adaptation.
In the sequel, set 15 years after the events of the first book, Gilead is still, unfortunately, thriving. The story is alternately told by the villainous Aunt Lydia and Agnes and Daisy, June’s daughters. (Daisy’s name is actually Nicole, but she didn’t know it because she was smuggled out of Gilead and adopted.) The Testaments excerpt doesn’t include the names of the characters giving each testimony, but it seems likely that Aunt Lydia is the one who kicks things off, writing a melancholy rumination on her life.
“Over the years I’ve buried a lot of bones; now I’m inclined to dig them up again — if only for your edification, my unknown reader,” the aunt writes. “If you are reading, this manuscript at least will have survived. Though perhaps I’m fantasizing: perhaps I will never have a reader. Perhaps I’ll only be talking to the wall, in more ways than one.”
The second entry is from a girl who grew up in Gilead (Agnes, presumably), and the third is from a girl who grew up in Canada with adoptive parents Neil and Melanie, who owned a used-clothing store called the Clothes Hound. In her testimony she talks about discovering that her parents forged her birthday. “Neil and Melanie lied to me about that: they’d done it for the best of reasons and they’d meant really well, but when I first found out about it I was very angry at them,” she notes.
In her New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani writes that the book’s main story line is a spy thriller of sorts about a mole inside Gilead. June, aka Offred—played on the TV series by Elisabeth Moss—“makes only the briefest of appearances, speaking a scant three sentences. But she has attained almost mythic status in Gilead, where she’s been declared a terrorist and enemy of the state: The regime has already made at least two assassination attempts on her life.”
It’s unclear if this glimpse at the world of Gilead 15 years down the line will impact the Hulu adaptation. The series is currently headed for a fourth season, likely set to air in 2020.
— How intimacy coordinators are changing Hollywood sex scenes
— The Crown’s Helena Bonham Carter on her “scary” encounter with Princess Margaret
— The Trump-baiting Anthony Scaramucci interview that roiled the president
— What happens when you try to be the next Game of Thrones
— Why are teens flocking to Jake Gyllenhaal’s Broadway show?
— From the Archive: Keanu Reeves, young and restless
Looking for more? Sign up for our daily Hollywood newsletter and never miss a story.
