The Handmaid's Tale
The Graphic Novel
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4.7 • 9 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Provocative, startling, prophetic, and more relevant than ever, The Handmaid's Tale has become a global phenomenon. Now, in this stunning graphic novel edition of Margaret Atwood's modern classic, the terrifying reality of Gilead is brought to vivid life like never before.
"Everything Handmaids wear is red: the colour of blood, which defines us." Offred is a Handmaid in the Republic of Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships. She serves in the household of the Commander and his wife, and under the new social order she has only one purpose: once a month, she must lie on her back and pray that the Commander makes her pregnant, ecause in an age of declining births, Offred and the other Handmaids are valued only if they are fertile. But Offred remembers the years before Gilead, when she was an independent woman who had a job, a family, and a name of her own. Now, her memories and her will to survive are acts of rebellion.
The Handmaid's Tale and its iconic images - the red of the Handmaids, the blue of the Wives, the looming Gileadean Eye - have been adapted into a film, an opera, a ballet, and multi-award-winning TV series. This groundbreaking new graphic novel edition, adapted and featuring arresting artwork by Renée Nault, is destined to become a classic in its own right.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Equal parts gorgeous and horrifying, Nault's adaptation faithfully follows both the plot and style of Atwood's 1985 dystopian novel. Narrator Offred lives in Gilead, a United States that is both unrecognizable and too familiar: the government strips women of their freedom in the name of protecting them, discards the old and infirm, and loves fetuses more than the living. Offred says, "Everything Handmaids wear is red: the color of blood, which defines us." Nault's reds are rich and layered watercolors, rust to flame. In one frame, she draws hanged Handmaid bodies as drooping crimson flowers. Nault's semiabstracted interpretations of traumatic scenes are stronger than the story's more pedestrian moments, when it's hard not to feel the flatness of the pale characters' expressions. Painting life in Gilead's toxic, war-torn Colonies, Nault takes great advantage of the graphic form. In Atwood's text, exile is frightening because it is a void. Here the cancer-eaten jaw of an "unwoman" worker is on full display. Atwood fans may shrug at another incarnation of this classic, but it's skillfully done and likely to appeal to younger readers; the tale's relevance and Nault's talent are undeniable.
