HANDMAID'S TALE: Luxury Edition

'We slept in what had once been the gymnasium... there was old sex in the room and loneliness, and expectation, of something without a shape or name. I remember that yearning, for something that was always about to happen and was never the same as the hands that were on us there and then, in the small of the back, or out back, in the parking lot, or in the television room with the sound turned down and only pictures flickering over the lifting flesh. We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? It was in the air; and it was still in the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in the army cots that had been set up in rows, with spaces between so we could not talk... We learned to lip read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other's mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed: Alma. Janine. Delores. Moira. June.' Set in the near future, The Handmaid's Tale describes life in what was once the United States and is now called the Republic of Gilead, a monotheocracy that has reacted to social unrest and a sharply declining birth rate by reverting to and going beyond the repressive intolerance of the original Puritans. The regime takes the book of Genesis absolutely at its word, with bizarre consequences for the men and women of its population. This story is told through the eyes of Offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order. In condensed but eloquent prose, by turns cool-eyed, tender, despairing, passionate and wry, Margaret Atwood reveals the dark corners behind the establishment's calm facade with such power that the reader will be unable to forget its images and its forecast. This deluxe edition of the modern classic, now made into a hugely popular TV series, includes historical notes and has a dark red bonded leather bound flexicover with rounded corners and silver gilt edged pages, ribbon marker. 311pp.