“Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will become ordinary.”
Margaret Atwood’s classic novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, is a story that is uncomfortable and difficult to deal with. Set in a dystopian America, the government has been overthrown by religiously conservative extremists, the constitution is gone, and women have had their rights stripped from them. They are sorted into occupations that reverted back into traditional female roles, from being housewives and cooks and maids.
“And I saw a little girl, her eyes tightly closed, holding to her breast the old kind of world, one that she knew in her heart could not remain, and she was holding it and pleading, never to let her go.”
In a genre-bending tale of innocence and the inevitable loss thereof, Booker Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro delivers a haunting and emotional account of a dystopian society that fans of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale will devour.