The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Set in a dystopian future, The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a world in which an environmental catastrophe has led to the majority of the female population becoming infertile. When a fundamentalist religious group seizes control of what was once the USA, fertile women are rounded up and trained to be silent, nameless ‘handmaids’, forced to procreate with the men in power. An important feminist text, Margaret Atwood’s novel explores the consequences of a reversal of women’s rights and has since been made into a hit TV series.