“…a triumphantly wide-ranging novel, told in a hybrid of prose and poetry, about the struggles, longings, conflicts and betrayals of 12 (mostly) black women and one non-binary character. In this new novel, Atwood is far more focused on creating a brisk thriller than she is on exploring the perversity of systemic repression … the fact that Atwood keeps challenging such categories is all part of her extraordinary effort to resist the chains we place on each other … Praise be.” Aunt Lydia is a mercurial assassin: a pious leader, a ruthless administrator, a deliciously acerbic confessor … Interlaced among her journal entries are the testimonies of two young women … Their mysterious identities fuel much of the story’s suspense-and electrify the novel with an extra dose of melodrama … The Testaments is not nearly the devastating satire of political and theological misogyny that The Handmaid’s Tale is.
It’s a brilliant strategic move that turns the world of Gilead inside out … Aunt Lydia’s wry wit…endows The Testaments with far more humor than The Handmaid’s Tale or its exceedingly grim TV adaptation … That’s the genius of Atwood’s creation. Inevitably, the details are less shocking … Atwood responds to the challenge of that familiarity by giving us the narrator we least expect: Aunt Lydia. “ The Testaments opens in Gilead about 15 years after The Handmaid’s Tale, but it’s an entirely different novel in form and tone. –Leah Hager Cohen ( The New York Times Book Review) The book leaves us gutted and marveling: Life may be short, but it takes forever” If he has a sharp eye for brokenness, he is even keener on the inextinguishable flicker of love that remains. He shows us lots of monstrous behavior, but not a single monster-only damage. He’s lovely, Douglas Stuart, fierce and loving and lovely. The book would be just about unbearable were it not for the author’s astonishing capacity for love. The wonder is how crazily, improbably alive it all is. And this is the world of Agnes Bain, his glamorous, calamitous mother, drinking herself ever so slowly to death. This is the world of Shuggie Bain, a little boy growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s.
“ The body-especially the body in pain-blazes on the pages of Shuggie Bain. While you’re still in Booker mode, why not take a journey into the recent past with us, and see what the critics wrote about every previous Booker Prize-winning novel of the 21st century? We now know that South African writer Damon Galgut has taken home the 2021 Booker Prize for his latest novel, The Promise, so congratulations to him (and to everyone at Europa Editions!).
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