(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)<br><br>A gripping vision of our society radically overturned by a theocratic revolution, Margaret Atwood's <i>The Handmaid's Tale </i>has become one of the most powerful and most widely read novels of our time.<br><br>Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, serving in the household of the enigmatic Commander and his bitter wife. She may go out once a day to markets whose signs are now pictures because women are not allowed to read. She must pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, for in a time of declining birthrates her value lies in her fertility, and failure means exile to the dangerously polluted Colonies. Offred can remember a time when she lived with her husband and daughter and had a job, before she lost even her own name. Now she navigates the intimate secrets of those who control her every move, risking her life in breaking the rules. <br><br>Like Aldous Huxley's <i>Brave New World </i>and George Orwell's <i>Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid's Tale </i>has endured not only as a literary landmark but as a warning of a possible future that is still chillingly relevant.