Crowds gathered at midnight Monday night to lay their hands on a copy at bookstores across Britain.

The anticipation surrounding “The Testaments,” which comes 34 years after publication “The Handmaid’s Tale,” has resembled the frenzy that greeted new Harry Potter installments. But luckily we’re in accord most of the time.” “When I said, ‘Hands off that baby,’ said, ‘Oh, OK,’” Atwood recalled with a laugh.Īs for the show, “I read the scripts I make notes on them,” she said. The author said she was in regular contact with Miller and clued him in, at least in general terms, about where she planned to take the story in “The Testaments” – for example, her intention to write about Nichole, the baby Offred has with Nick, Commander Waterford’s aide. “Human beings throughout time love outfits that tell you who you’re looking at, like football teams and things like that. “There some new costume choices in this book,” said Atwood, who is Canadian.

If “The Testaments” can be worked into the current TV series, a wardrobe shift will apparently be necessary: The book jacket shows a silhouette of a handmaid in a green robe instead of a red one. “How did it collapse? How do these kinds of regimes disappear?….I was interested in exploring that.” It’s no longer present 200 years into the future, because they’re having a symposium on it” at the end of the original novel, Atwood told a small gathering of journalists in London.

“Although I could not continue with the story of Offred, I could continue with three other people concerned in these events and tell the story of the beginning of the end, because we know from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ that Gilead vanishes. The narrator in the sequel is no longer Offred (the character played by Elisabeth Moss in the Hulu/MGM series) but instead three women, including the fearsome disciplinarian Aunt Lydia (played by Ann Dowd). MGM and Hulu are reportedly developing “The Testaments” for television and discussing with showrunner Bruce Miller whether the new book can be integrated into “The Handmaid’s Tale” series, a fourth season of which has been ordered.

“The Testaments” picks up about 15 years after “ The Handmaid’s Tale,” far past the point where the acclaimed TV adaptation has taken the story through its three seasons.

Margaret atwood the testaments