The Handmaid's Tale's author at launch of sequel

(10 Sep 2019) Author Margaret Atwood read from and discussed her new book "The Testaments' at a launch event in London on Tuesday.

The highly anticipated follow-up to 'The Handmaid's Tale', 'The Testaments" is inarguably one of the year's biggest books.

Atwood told the audience that she and the publishers were targeted in cyber attacks aimed at stealing the manuscript, and publisher Penguin enforced tight pre-publication security, slightly compromised when Amazon sent some customers copies early.

Amazon apologised for the "technical glitch."

The book was launched with "Harry Potter" levels of hype: midnight launches in British book stores, a press conference for international journalists and a celebrity-studded evening gala broadcast to 1,300 movie theatres around the world.

The novel is on the shortlist for the prestigious Booker Prize, Atwood's sixth time as a Booker finalist.

She has won the prize once, along with a slew of other awards including Canada's Governor General's Award and the PEN/Pinter free-speech prize.

Atwood, who turns 80 in November, said she is "pleased and grateful," by the continued support from her readers but was unfazed.

The Canadian author noted that several US states have enacted laws limiting women's control over reproduction that she likens to Gilead, the theocratic future United States where the books are set..

When "The Handmaid's Tale" was published in 1985, many found the idea of a democratic US supplanted by a fundamentalist state far-fetched.

With authoritarianism on the rise around the world, it now strikes many as eerily prescient.

"The Testaments" is set about 15 years after the previous book ends with main protagonist Offred fleeing to an undetermined future, and has three narrators, including Aunt Lydia, one of Gilead's fearsome enforcers, who features in both the book and series of "The Handmaid's Tale."

The author says it tells the story of "the beginning of the end" of Gilead.

The TV show has helped make Atwood's fictional world a cultural touchstone.

Demonstrators around the world routinely don the red cloaks and bonnets of the TV series' handmaids at protests against authoritarianism and for women's rights.

"It's brilliant as a protest tactic because you're not making a disturbance, you're not saying anything, you're sitting very silently and modestly," said Atwood, "and you can't be kicked out for dressing inappropriately because you're all covered up. No bare shoulders, no frightful bare shoulders."



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