Todd Doughty, executive director for publicity at Doubleday, wrote in a terse statement, “A very small number of copies of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments were distributed early due to a retailer error which has now been rectified.' With the embargo smashed, a number of publications rushed out their reviews. 10 publication date, or even to open the shipping boxes.Ī week before the publication date, the giant online retailer sent out an unknown number of copies of The Testaments to American customers who had ordered in advance. Booksellers were required to sign unusually stringent contracts, complete with financial penalties, promising not to sell the novel before its Sept.

No early copies for critics those few who did get copies were required to sign strict nondisclosure agreements, their reviews embargoed until the book’s publication.Īmong those who got their hands on The Testaments early were the judges for Great Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize, who included the novel as one of the six short-listed for the 2019 award.Ī first printing of half a million copies was scheduled. Talese/Doubleday (an imprint of Penguin Random House) was keeping it under tighter wraps than the Mueller Report.

It's all very speedy but emotionally inert, Atwood lining up her pieces at the expense of a more rigorous engagement with interior experience.As for The Testaments, publisher Nan A.

After her stand-in parents - a discerning reader might identify them as Moira and Luke - are killed in the first of the book's many tantalizing twists, she learns her true identity and is thrust into the heart of Mayday's Canada operation. Atwood details her simmering rage as her wicked stepmother mentally tortures her, planning to marry her off to a vile older Commander when she's just 13 she begins viewing Gilead's practices with conflicted horror.

Agnes, at least, has the Gilead factor to explain why. These are staggering discoveries in spite of the first-person narratives, we don't get inside their traumatic impact. Both Agnes and Nicole learn in the book's first third that the people they believed to be their parents are not related to them - and that their actual mother is a great mystery. Atwood deftly balances her three narrators as her plot hurtles forward, but her characterization is lacking.

Margaret atwood the testaments