#12 in Dystopian
The Handmaid's Tale
- 352
- Pages
- about 6 h
- Reading time
- Series 2017 +1
- On screen
- NYT bestseller · 33 weeks on the list, peaked at #3
- Arthur C. Clarke Award
- Los Angeles Times Book Prize
- Governor General's Award for English-language fiction
- Audie Awards
- NPR Top 100 Science Fiction and Fantasy Books
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Our view
Atwood builds Gilead from the inside, through the voice of a woman who has lost even her own name and tells her story in order to endure it. That narrow, intimate viewpoint is the book’s strength: the regime is experienced rather than explained. Some readers note how uncomfortably close it sits to the present. A dark, tense read with little relief, best suited to those who want a dystopia that unsettles rather than entertains.
Worth knowing Atwood began it in West Berlin in 1984 with one rule: nothing would happen in Gilead that people had not already done somewhere in history. It won the first Arthur C. Clarke Award. Do not skip the Historical Notes at the end, which reframe everything before them. The Testaments (2019), set fifteen years later, shared the Booker Prize, and the Hulu series began in 2017.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
The Handmaid's Tale is a futuristic dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood published in 1985. It is set in a near-future New England in a patriarchal, totalitarian theonomic state known as the Republic of Gilead, which has overthrown the United States government. The protagonist, a woman named Offred, occupies the role of a "Handmaid": women who are forcibly assigned to bear children for high status men.
Reading order · The Handmaid's Tale
Full order & progress →- The Handmaid's TaleThis book
8.28.2 / 10 - The Testaments
8.18.1 / 10
On screen
This book has been adapted for the screen 2 times — from 1990 to 2017.
Adaptation data: Wikidata · On screen →
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.2 across 3,682 ratings. With that many, the reader vote carries 96% of the weight and the score stays at 8.2 — the Dystopian average of 7.7 barely moves it.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 7.9 | 134 | 4% |
| Google Books | 9.0 | 6 | 0% |
| Hardcover | 8.2 | 3.5K | 96% |
Frequently asked
How long is The Handmaid's Tale?
It has 352 pages — shorter than 65% of the ranked books in Dystopian.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Dystopian — with scores between 7.5 and 8.4, closest to this book.
