The Handmaid's Tale

Atwood's 1985 novel never tells you the narrator's name, and that absence is part of its power. You live inside the head of a woman whose identity has been confiscated, piecing her together from scraps of memory, whispered names in a dormitory and the small defiances she allows herself in thought. The series gives June a face, a name and years of open rebellion. The book stays close and claustrophobic, and it ends where its uncertainty is sharpest. What the screen can only show from outside, the novel delivers as voice: wry, frightened and precise about how ordinary life slid into Gilead. It also keeps the parts of Gilead the show left out, including its racial persecution, which makes the regime's logic colder and more complete. For anyone who has watched the seasons roll on, the original is a short, concentrated reminder of where it all came from, and of how much horror Atwood could fit into restraint.

Five seasons of the series take place after the point where Atwood's novel stops. Season 1 ends roughly where the book does, with Offred led away by men who may be Eyes or may be the resistance. Everything after that was invented for television. It also does not follow The Testaments, Atwood's own 2019 sequel, which is being adapted separately. The narrator gets a full name on screen, June Osborne, in the very first episode. The novel never names her, and readers only inferred 'June' from the names the handmaids whisper in the dormitory. The setting moves too. The book reads as the 1980s, while the series places Gilead's rise in a world of smartphones and shows June at women's marches. The show's Gilead is racially mixed, with Moira and Luke played by Black actors. In the novel Moira is white, and Gilead persecutes Black citizens as the 'Children of Ham' and drives them out, a theme the series drops. Serena Joy is much younger than in the book, a choice made to sharpen her rivalry with Offred. There are also more gay characters; Ofglen, for one, is gay in the show. Some events are reshuffled. On screen Moira is already at the Red Center and teaches June the rules, where the book has it the other way round. The show's Janine loses an eye as punishment, while in the novel it is Moira who defies the Aunts and has her feet beaten with steel rods.