The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood

I read this to prepare myself for reading Atwood's Booker prize-winning follow up novel, The Testaments. Written 35 years later. 

But it's a classic and I should have read it years ago. Actually, I don't really know how I escaped it, as so many of my students studied it for A Level English.

Anyway, an incredible novel. I was totally drawn from the start. The plot follows Offred - a handmaiden of Gilead. The novel's set in a post-civil nuclear war. In what was the United States of America. That old world has gone. What's replaced it is a patriarchal dystopian dictatorship. 

Offred's life is changed. Separated from her partner - Luke and her daughter. She's accepted life as a handmaiden sent out to live with a childless couple to produce a child. 
She's an object. A baby-making body, sent out to produce children for the infertile elite.