Atwood's sequel reveals the Handmaid's Tale villain Aunt Lydia as a secret mole
Thirty-four years after The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood returned to Gilead with The Testaments, set fifteen years later. Its most surprising voice belongs to Aunt Lydia, the enforcer readers loved to hate, who turns out to be quietly working to bring the regime down. The novel shared the 2019 Booker Prize with Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other.
Three women narrate. Lydia recounts how, as a divorced judge, she was herded into a stadium with other women when Gilead seized power, starved, tortured and forced to take part in an execution. Commander Judd then picked her and a handful of others, including a zealous early supporter named Vidala, to become Aunts, the elite women who write and police the rules for all other women. From Ardua Hall they enjoy rare privileges, such as reading banned books.
Agnes Jemima is raised in Boston by Commander Kyle, who adopted her, and his affectionate wife Tabitha, who falls ill and dies. At an elite school for Commanders' daughters, girls learn to run households but not to read. Her stepmother Paula resents her, and Agnes is promised in marriage to the much older Judd. Discovering that her birth mother was a Handmaid, she escapes the match by training as an Aunt with her friend Becka, who has suffered years of abuse by her father, a respected dentist. Anonymous files then expose the regime's rot, including Judd's killing of past wives.
In Toronto, Daisy lives with Neil and Melanie, whose second-hand clothes shop secretly helps the resistance group Mayday smuggle women out of Gilead. On her sixteenth birthday Gileadean agents murder them, and Mayday tells her the truth: she is Baby Nicole, a child famously spirited out of Gilead, and Agnes's half-sister. Disguised as a street kid called Jade, she lets Gilead's missionary Pearl Girls recruit her.
Inside Ardua Hall the threads converge. Lydia confirms Nicole's identity from a tattoo, reveals herself as Mayday's informant and plans to smuggle damning evidence out on a microdot hidden in Nicole's cross-shaped tattoo, with the sisters travelling disguised as Pearl Girls and Becka covering their escape. The novel also won the Goodreads Choice Award for fiction in 2019 by more than 50,000 votes, and a Hulu series with Ann Dowd as Lydia premiered on 8 April 2026.
Source: The Testaments
