With waves lapping in the background and a wonky cellphone connection, Margaret Atwood, The Most Popular Author In The World Right Now, is hunkered down in a shielded nook somewhere in the wilds of the Lake Erie island where she has a home. The things an author must do in the name of book promotion. “There’s a live event in London which is streaming to 1,500 cinemas in the rest of the world,” she’s saying. “Because if you actually went to those 1,500 places you’d be burning up a lot of carbon.” We are talking, of course, about the release of The Testaments, the much-hyped sequel to her 1985 book The Handmaid’s Tale, which has spawned TV shows, memes and worldwide excitement.The Testaments has already appeared on the Booker Prize shortlist (she won in 2000 for The Blind Assassin) and the Giller Prize longlist (she won in 1996 for Alias Grace) — under a cloak of secrecy Gilead’s Aunt Lydia might admire. In a turn of events that only helps a book that’s also already made “most anticipated books this fall” lists everywhere, judges for the various prizes could read the book, which isn’t released until Sept. 10, but couldn’t actually talk about it. This left the Booker judges to sum up their nomination simply: “Spoiler discretion and a ferocious non-disclosure agreement prevent any description of who, how, why and even where. So this: it’s terrifying and exhilarating.”Which it is. Gilead is also, in some ways, just what we’d expect to see 15 years after Offred left the Commissioner’s house to step into a van going God knows where, with the parting words “And so I step up, into the darkness within; or else the light.” So now, we step into a mature Gilead. There’s the Underground Femaleroad taking women out of Gilead and into Canada, corruption at the top, treachery, lies, murder, well-born girls who’ll do just about anything to ...
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