The Handmaid's Tale

By: Margaret Atwood

Narrated by: Claire Danes

Length: 11 hrs and 1 min

Publisher's summary

Audie Award, Fiction, 2013

Margaret Atwood's popular dystopian novel The Handmaid's Tale explores a broad range of issues relating to power, gender, and religious politics. Multiple Golden Globe award-winner Claire Danes (Romeo and Juliet, The Hours) gives a stirring performance of this classic in speculative fiction, one of the most powerful and widely read novels of our time.

After a staged terrorist attack kills the President and most of Congress, the government is deposed and taken over by the oppressive and all-controlling Republic of Gilead. Offred, now a Handmaid serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife, can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Despite the danger, Offred learns to navigate the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules in hopes of ending this oppression.

Cover Art by Fred Marcellino. Used with permission of Pippin Properties, Inc.

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©1985 Margaret Atwood (P)2012 Audible, Inc.

Critic reviews

“Claire Danes sparkles in this performance…Danes’s Offred is complex, and her flashes of intense strength highlight her vulnerability. This is a consuming listen, thanks to Danes’s emotional subtleties.” (AudioFile)

I was was there!

I loved this book. I felt that I was agonizing over everything the main character experienced. Maragaret Arwood is an excellent writer.

Excellent!

Narrator was fantastic! Love this book. A quick read that you won't want to pause.

Great story and fantastic narration

First time I've read this book, and I'm so glad to have heard Clare Danes' performance. Fantastic.

Typical Atwood Brilliance and a great performance

Danes does a great read, and from reading reviews on goodreads, the spoken performance might be easier to understand than the book, but saying would give some of the plot away so I won't. The story is excellent, thought written about a terrible dystopian world (that is downright eerie in its prescience, when you realize it was written in '84) so sometimes the story feels terrible. The ending is classic Atwood-- brilliant and unexpected, leaving the reader with lots to consider.

Incredible

This book is a masterpiece. A painful and nuanced examination of what it means to be human, to be female, to be free. I absolutely couldn't put it down from beginning to end.

A terrifying, timeless, educational classic.

I hadn't read this book since high school, and rereading it - especially in these harrowing political times - refreshed my memory of its not-altogether-implausible details in a very real way.

Focus especially on chapter 28. It doesn't sound too difficult, does it? Totalitarian take over of a government by a crazed right-wing minority? A little violence, then takeover of the American banking system, made easy by our reliance on virtual money? You don't even have to be a doomsday prepper for that particular chapter to make you queasy.

Every American should be encouraged to read this book. NOW.

Awesome

The Handmaid's Tale is a fantastic and intriguing novel. Narration by Claire Dane was phenomenal.

Tension

I am glad the show has taken it upon itself to fill in the illusory gaps of these characters. I listened to this novel after watching the show so I could compare the two. As an academic source about history this is incredibly insightful for women of American culture. I understood what Atwood was trying to do by building up tension right up to the end of the story and then letting us the reader try to imagine what would have happened to Offred and the cast. However I thought the book would have benefitted a great deal more from being fully fleshed out. The book reminds me of a historian's expression of the Holocaust where to assign any me meaning to such suffering is to justify it's happening. I felt that Atwood wanted us to feel the absolute bleakness and trauma of Offred's imprisonment. She wanted us to feel like it is us who is the handmaid with no foreseeable way out. To vicariously live his existence is a safe version of living speculative future. I give the story 4 stars because I wanted Atwood to deliver on all that tension she built up for us rather than leaving it in obscurity. I could obtain critical thought without drawing conclusions about Offred myself. Thank you for a wonderful read.

Not my type of story.

Would you listen to The Handmaid's Tale again? Why?

I wouldn't listen to this again, even though I loved the story teller. I just didn't like the way the author wrapped it up. The story was very slow in some sections. Just wasn't the book for me.

What about Claire Danes’s performance did you like?

She has an amazing voice and can make an ordinary story a little better.

A breathtaking listen

What did you love best about The Handmaid's Tale?

I've read this book before, but Claire Dane's adds a whole new level to Offred, bringing her to life and giving her voice a sharper impact than I had ever experienced just reading the words.