Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

- It's Gilead up close and it's absorbing from the start. Atwood has pulled this off. It's an astonishingly good and fascinating story. 

- There are three main characters: Aunt Lydia, who is invested with a lot more power, and is redeemed; teenager Agnes, child of Gilead privilege, who finally learns to read and write and understand; and 'Baby Nicole' (now 13 year old Jade) who the Handmaid June succeeded in safely sending to Canada, and has now been sent back to Gilead on a mission.

- The backstories, particularly those of Aunt Lydia and her colleagues and their former pre-Gilead lives and professions, are full of fascinating detail. This sort of fleshing out, something missing in The Handmaid's Tale, is extremely satisfying. Lydia, despite being cunning, calculating, clever and a serious plotter, is portrayed as a sympathetic character. The book is basically about her and her privileged Aunty status. 

- As Lydia has recognised, ‘the aims of Gilead at the outset were pure and noble, we all agree. But they have been subverted and sullied by the selfish and the power-mad, as so often happens in the course of history’. ‘Bearing false witness was not the exception, it was common. Beneath its outer show of virtue and purity, Gilead was rotten’. 

- There are biblical and literary 'sayings' liberally sprinkled throughout the conversations recorded by the Gilead women. They are easy substitutes for critical thought and analysis, and typify the exquisite banality of Gilead belief. Even the words 'God' and 'Love' can’t be associated.  

- However Agnes is being awakened by being exposed to secret files and recordings secretly provided to her by Aunt Lydia, who is clearly working to undermine and destroy Gilead. One revelation is that Gilead's current leader, Commander Judd, who has had multiple wives, eventually murdered all of them by poisoning. He prefers his wives young. There is no divorce in Gilead so what else is a man to do?. 

- Agnes learns that she is the first daughter, and Baby Nicole the second daughter of the Handmaid Offred who escaped to Canada. They are half-sisters. Lydia also discloses to her, via a file note, that Baby Nicole has returned to Gilead, and for nefarious reasons.

- The ending pulls all the threads together in a very satisfying way. 

- The Handmaid's Tale made the Booker Prize shortlist in 1986 but did not win the prize (which went to Kingsley Amis' The Old Devils). This year The Testaments is on the shortlist. The smart money has it winning, making up for the 1986 'mistake'.