Margaret Atwood’s Writing a "Handmaid’s Tale" Sequel Set 15 Years After [REDACTED]

Praise be.

Get ready to have another Margaret Atwood banger added to your reading curriculum.

On Twitter, the author of The Handmaid’s Tale revealed she’s working on a sequel due out in September of 2019.

Titled The Testaments, it will apparently follow three female narrators and take place (very, very mild spoilers ahead) 15 years after main character Offred’s final scene in the first iconic book.

And despite coming three decades after the original, Atwood said "the world we've been living in" has served as inspiration for the new story.

Readers of Atwood’s 1985 text know that the book offers Offred an ambiguous ending. Viewers of the TV adaptation, starring Elisabeth Moss as Offred (AKA June), have been led down a slightly different path.

Real spoilers ahead.

In the book, Offred is loaded into a van and faces an uncertain future, which is how the first season of the TV show ends as well. But the first episode of S2 showed her destination, and then proceeded to continue Offred’s story. The book, on the other hand, flashes forward 200 years without revealing Offred’s fate, and instead takes place in a new society where women enjoy restored rights.

Will Atwood’s book—set after the events of the current Handmaid’s Tale show but well before her original book’s epilogue—stick to the show’s script, or will it provide some different explanations? And will we start to see the fall of Gilead, led by its three new heroes?

Yeah, we don’t know. We’re not writing the thing. You’ll just have to wait until next September.

Until then, you can watch The Handmaid’s Tale on SBS on Demand, or catch-up with Atwood’s original novel, or read almost any depressing news story about current events, because same diff.

Header Image: Hulu