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About the Book

‘There is more than one kind of freedom’

Can we ever be wholly free? In this book of breathtaking imaginary leaps that conjure dystopias and magical islands, Margaret Atwood holds a mirror up to our own world. The reflection we are faced with, of men and women in prisons literal and metaphorical, is frightening, but it is also a call to arms to speak and to act to preserve our freedom while we still can. And in that, there is hope.

This ebook contains selections from The Handmaid’s Tale and Hag-Seed by Margaret Atwood.

About the Author

MARGARET ATWOOD is one of the world’s most celebrated writers and critics. Born in Canada in 1939, she has written over 70 books, among them prize-winning novels The Blind Assassin, Cat’s Eye, Alias Grace and The Heart Goes Last, acclaimed poetry, short stories and non-fiction, books for children and a graphic novel.

She addresses the theme of humanity’s freedom, or lack thereof, throughout her work, most notably in the internationally bestselling The Handmaid’s Tale. First published in 1985, the novel saw a marked resurgence upon the election of Donald Trump as US President in 2016. It was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning TV series of the same name in 2017. About its origins, Atwood has said: ‘One of my rules was that I would not put any events into the book that had not already happened in what James Joyce called the “nightmare” of history, nor any technology not already available. No imaginary gizmos, no imaginary laws, no imaginary atrocities. God is in the details, they say. So is the devil.’

Margaret Atwood was the first contributor to the Future Library with her book Scribbler Moon. The manuscript lies buried in a Norwegian forest and will be published in 2115. She is an outspoken activist for human rights and environmental causes and she and her partner, the writer Graeme Gibson, are Joint Honorary Presidents of the Rare Bird Society.

Recommended Books by Margaret Atwood

Hag-Seed

Alias Grace

The Heart Goes Last

We Are Double-Plus Unfree

‘A ROBIN REDBREAST in a cage, Puts all Heaven in a Rage,’ wrote William Blake. ‘Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall,’ wrote John Milton, channelling God’s musings about mankind and free will in the third book of Paradise Lost. ‘Freedom, high-day, high-day, freedom …!’ chants Caliban in The Tempest. Mind you, he is drunk at the time, and overly optimistic: the choice he is making is not freedom, but subjection to a tyrant.

We’re always talking about it, this ‘freedom’. But what do we mean by it? ‘There is more than one kind of freedom,’ Aunt Lydia lectures the captive Handmaids in my 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale. ‘Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don’t underrate it.’