Reading The Handmaiden’s Tale, which was very overdue of many years -of course the world is not short of books of world-gone-wrong dystopias, but this is something else and nearly if not in the league of ‘Nineteen-Eighty Four ‘. Well, I’m only half-way through so it could go.. ‘wrong’ is surely the wrong word as the story has precisely gone as wrong as it could be. Unimaginably so, one would like to say … but unfortunately there’s quite a few places in the world where that dystopia of women’s oppression, of extreme alienation and political repression in the name of religion and virtue, is the daily reality.

As for the writing itself, it is very well done and gripping. Of course there seem to be enormous holes in the plot but that somehow doesn’t matter -or it hasn’t mattered to me thus far.