The handmaid's tale / Margaret Atwood.

I just loved this book. The writing is wonderful and the unexpected events kept me guessing as to what would happen next. It is set in the totalitarian state of the Republic of Gilead and is narrated by Offred, although that is not her original name. We never find out what her real name is, because she is a Handmaid renamed Offred, being assigned to a man named Fred ("the Commander") for the purposes of bearing his child. The Commander has a wife but fertility rates in this time period are so low that the few fertile women are assigned to high ranking officials for reproduction.

Because she has the precious ability to reproduce and is a Handmaid, Offred is among one of the most watched and heavily guarded group. One day, against all the rules, the Commander secretly communicates with her outside of their usual, acceptable interaction. This begins a change in Offred's life that she could never have imagined.

This is the Republic of Gilead, located in the U.S., and established after the American president and members of Congress were all assassinated and the army taken over. The Constitution was suspended, temporarily it was said, and newspapers were censored and some closed down. This totalitarian society is heavily guarded, citizens are rigidly controlled and spies are everywhere. Punishment is severe and often openly displayed.

Offred remembers life in the time "before," before she was forced into this society. When she sees the shocking sight of executed prisoners, she remembers the words of a Gilead teacher, "Ordinary, said Aunt Lydia, is what you are used to. This may not seem ordinary to you now, but after a time it will. It will seem ordinary."

American Library Association's Choice review: "One of Canada's outstanding authors (an old poem of hers reads, ``You fit into me/ like a hook into an eye/ a fish hook/ an open eye'') has written a novel to rival Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four. It is the US nearly a century from now, its government a repressive theocracy where women are nothing and everything. They are enslaved, so this is an important feminist novel; but they serve an elderly commander whose sole function is to mechanically impregnate them, like some slave insect that quickens a queen bee. The men are few, the women many. The narrator is one of these queen bees, Offred-she belongs to Fred-and she pieces her story together slowly and with such matter-of-fact and nightmarish credibility that an entire society is realized, a horror world so muffled and enclosed that when one of the women says an innocent and anachronistic 20th-century ``hello'' to another, a chill races down the reader's spine. Although its contents are sometimes sensationalist, it is a magnificently crafted and understated novel. Unreservedly recommended."