Recommendations
Books Like Handmaid's Tale
What to read after The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is the foundational text of feminist dystopia — a novel about what happens when women's bodies become the property of a patriarchal religious state. If you loved the political ferocity, the speculative-near-future setting, and Offred's voice, these eight books will satisfy the same appetite.
- 1Buy
The Testaments
by Margaret Atwood
The direct sequel — set fifteen years after The Handmaid's Tale, narrated by three women including Aunt Lydia; Booker Prize winner 2019
- 2Buy
1984
by George Orwell
The foundational dystopian novel that The Handmaid's Tale is most directly in dialogue with — a totalitarian state that extends into the interior of its citizens' minds; the same sense of a person trying to preserve selfhood against a total system
- 3Buy
Never Let Me Go
by Kazuo Ishiguro
People who have been assigned a fate by a society that has decided their bodies exist for the society's use — quieter than The Handmaid's Tale but in dialogue with the same questions about bodily autonomy and what individuals do with fates they didn't choose
- 4Buy
The Power of the Dog
by Naomi Alderman
A novel in which women develop the ability to deliver electric shocks — a response to The Handmaid's Tale that asks what women would do with physical power if they had it; provocative, important, and deeply in conversation with Atwood
- 5Buy
Brave New World
by Aldous Huxley
A world in which people are kept docile through pleasure and manufactured happiness — the other great 20th century dystopian novel; Atwood's Gilead controls through pain and restriction, Huxley's World State controls through abundance and entertainment
- 6Buy
Vox
by Christina Dalcher
A near-future America where women are allowed only 100 words per day — an explicit descendant of The Handmaid's Tale in its interest in what happens when women's voices and autonomy are systematically removed
- 7Buy
Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
A flu pandemic and the communities that survive — literary science fiction that shares The Handmaid's Tale's interest in what civilization can be rebuilt from collapse, but with more hope and less anger
- 8Buy
Oryx and Crake
by Margaret Atwood
Atwood's other great speculative novel — a man who is possibly the last human on earth, remembering the genetic scientist who caused a pandemic; same formal intelligence and same willingness to follow a speculative premise to its darkest logical conclusion
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