Dua’s Monthly Read for November 2025
“Margaret Atwood: iconic, heroic… prophetic? My monthly read for November is The Handmaid’s Tale, a book that terrified me when I read it in high school, but which I could at least mentally file under ‘dystopian fiction’.
“Today, I’m not so sure. The novel tells the story of a woman trapped in the hellish world of Gilead, where what was once known as the United States is transformed into a totalitarian theocracy. All women’s rights over their bodies have been erased and the novel’s protagonist, Offred, is now a Handmaid. Each month, Handmaids are ceremonially raped by their Commanders in a perverted echo of a Biblical story, and ordered to surrender any child conceived to their families.
“Margaret has said that she didn’t make any of it up. And after re-reading The Handmaid’s Tale alongside her incredible new memoir, Book of Lives, I understand what she means. Her memoir gives fascinating context to the story, as she shares the horrifying episodes in history that informed the writing of the book – and make it feel unsettlingly familiar to events taking place across the world right now.
“As Margaret says, the future exists in an infinite number of possibilities. The Handmaid’s Tale explores just one of these. The point of prophecy is to provide a warning – and it’s up to us to listen and choose the future we want to live in.” – Dua Lipa
Scroll down for Dua’s interview with the author and more content related to the book...
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