Books for our times

Ms Atwood quotes science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin to remind us that freedom 'is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one'

The Booker Prize brought Margaret Atwood to my attention. It led me first to A Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, and then to the 2019 prize-winner,  The Testaments. Ms Atwood wrote A Handmaid’s Tale  35 years ago in response to pervasive hostility towards women among zealots from the Christian right wing. Locating a truncated and conflict-ridden United States in the near future, she visualised a semi-religious tyranny ruling the republic, one in which women were kept in tightly controlled conditions and used either as menial workers or for sex and breeding. 

The Testaments picks up the narrative 15 years later. The