Atwood reveals cover for Handmaid’s Tale sequel

Margaret Atwood has revealed the cover for The Testaments, the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. 

The cover designed by Noma Bar, who worked on The Handmaid’s Tale hardcover reissue, sees the red Handmaid’s colour palette switched out for a bold green and features the figures of two women. 

Unveiling the cover on Twitter, Atwood said: “I am so pleased that Noma Bar – who did such a brilliant job with the hardcover reissue of The Handmaid’s Tale – took on the challenge of designing the cover for The Testaments.
 
“It can’t have been easy, but he came through with a cover that is fresh and intriguing: within an apparently simple double image, there are hidden figures to be discovered – just as in the book. I hope you like it as much as I do.”

Set 15 years after Offred's ambiguous final scene in the acclaimed 1985-published novel, The Testaments, slated for publication on 10th September 2019, promises to be a "global publishing event”.

Talking about the book, Atwood said: “Dear Readers: Everything you've ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we've been living in.”

Vintage will publish The Testaments under its Chatto & Windus imprint on 10th September, priced £20, after Becky Hardie, deputy publishing director of Chatto & Windus, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Karolina Sutton at Curtis Brown. 

The Testaments will be published simultaneously by Penguin Random House across the English-speaking world, by Chatto & Windus/VINTAGE in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and India, as well as in the UK; by McClelland & Stewart in Canada; and by Nan A. Talese/Knopf Doubleday in the US. 

First published in 1985 by Vintage imprint Jonathan Cape, The Handmaid’s Tale was shortlisted for the 1986 Booker Prize and is an A-level curriculum text in the UK. A third series of "The Handmaid's Tale" will air on US streaming service Hulu in the spring and will return Channel 4 in the UK not long after. 

Since 1998, The Handmaid’s Tale has sold 906,720 copies for £6.04m (across all editions), according to Nielsen BookScan with the biggest editions including the 1996 paperback (at 560,584 copies sold) and the 2017 TV tie-in edition (197,074). It also spent seven weeks at the Weekly E-book Ranking number one in summer 2017.