Margaret Atwood's new novel is The Testaments: The Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. From the transcript of her NPR interview with Scott Simon:SIMON: And what moved you to write a sequel 34 years after the original?--Marshal Zeringue
ATWOOD: Well, it seemed like time. People had been asking me to write a sequel for a long time, and I'd always said no because I thought they meant the continuation of the story of Offred, which I couldn't do. But then I thought, what if somebody else were telling the story? And what if it were, oh, 15 or 16 years later?
And it was also time because for a while, we thought we were moving away from "The Handmaid's Tale." And then we turned around and started going back towards it, ominously close in many parts of the world. And I felt it was possibly time to revisit the question of how do regimes like Gilead end because we know from "The Handmaid's Tale" that it did end.
SIMON: Tell us about these new narrators that pick up the action 15 years later.
ATWOOD: Oh, so there are three narrators. Two of them are...[read on]