Handmaid's sales: Margaret Atwood's The Testaments is immediate hit

Novelist’s return to the dystopia of Gilead sold more than 100,000 copies in hardback in its first week on sale in the UK

A hardback copy of Margaret Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments, was sold every four seconds in the UK last week, according to sales figures that show the dystopian novel racing to the top of this week’s book charts.

Published at midnight on Monday, The Testaments had sold 103,177 hardbacks by Saturday, according to official book sales monitor Nielsen BookScan. Set 15 years after the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, the novel traces the continued evolution of Atwood’s totalitarian state of Gilead, where women are reduced to their wombs and justification is found in the Bible for every abuse of power.

Continue reading...