coming soon

Margaret Atwood Is Writing a Handmaid’s Tale Sequel

The Testaments will take place 15 years after Offred’s final scene in the original novel.
Elisabeth Moss Ann Dowd.
Courtesy of Hulu.

Thirty-three years after she first published The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood has announced that she’s writing a sequel to her best-known work. In a tweet on Wednesday morning, Atwood said the new novel will be titled The Testaments, with three female characters serving as the narrators. It is due out next September.

X content

This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

“Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book,” Atwood wrote in a statement that appears in an embedded video. “Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.”

Atwood has been outspoken about the parallels between her novel, first published in 1985, and today’s political climate. As she told V.F. in an interview before Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale adaptation premiered in the spring of 2017, “It’s inexhaustible because we don’t know what [Donald Trump’s] next act is going to be. Or what’s going to happen next.”

Within the original Handmaid’s Tale itself, there are a few hints as to what comes after Offred’s story. In the novel’s epilogue, a history professor details the challenges he and a male colleague faced when trying to verify Offred’s account in the book—which, as it turns out, was actually a collection of tapes that the two men transcribed. As Atwood told V.F., she used the epilogue to prove that Gilead eventually fell. She was inspired, she said, by George Orwell, who used a similar device in 1984—which ends not with the action of the novel, but a guide to Newspeak. “Newspeak was supposed to abolish the ability to think. But the note about Newspeak [in 1984] is written in standard English in the past tense. So that tells us the regime of 1984 did not last,” she explained. What, exactly, came after Gilead—or how, precisely, the reign of Gilead reached its end—is what readers will presumably find out in The Testaments.

What’s most unclear right now is how this sequel might impact Hulu’s Emmy-winning adaptation of the original novel—and whether Atwood will choose to follow any of the same threads as the series. The series had exceeded the reach of its source material by the end of its first season, and has since forged an original story all its own, with the blessing but not the involvement of Atwood. A representative for Hulu did not immediately respond to V.F.’s request for comment—but given the time gap between when The Testaments will be set and where Hulu’s Handmaid’s Tale currently is in terms of story, it seems safe to assume that for now, at least, the two properties will not necessarily intersect.