The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

Cover Page (First Edition)

Description

The Handmaid's Tale is a dystopian novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, published in 1985. It was set in a near-future New England, in a totalitarian state, known as Gilead, that has overthrown the United States government. 

The Handmaid's Tale is an instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction. The novel is funny, unexpected, horrifying, and altogether convincing. It is a scathing satire, dire warning, and a tour de force. The novel has two parts: by night and by other various events. It can be interpreted as a double narrative: central protagonist Offred's personal struggle and the handmaids' shared plight. The night part is solely about Offred, and the other part (shopping, waiting room, household,etc.) are the stories that describe the possible life of every handmaid. Offred lives past and present to retell the events leading up to the fall of women's rights and the current details of the life that she now lives.

The story is told through the eyes of offred, one of the unfortunate Handmaids under the new social order in which women are vanquishing in the patriarchal society. By various means, these women resist and attempt to gain individuality and independence. In abridged but eloquent prose, she reveals the dark corners of the establishment's calm facade. 

The Handmaid Tale is one of the books that keep readers indulged in the book so much that they will never forget the images and its forecast. It is considered Margaret's best work. Her work of speculative fictions as such The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake are frequently assigned in high school classrooms to students as an open-ended question on the North American Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition exam each year. 

In November 2018, Atwood announced the sequel, titled  The Testaments, which was published in September 2019. The novel is set fifteen years after Offred's final scene, with the testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.

Awards

The Novel won:

• In 1985, Governor General's Award for English-Language Fiction
• In 1986, nominated for Booker Prize
• In 1986, nominated for Nebula Award
• In 1987, Arthur C. Clarke Award
• In 1987, nominated for Prometheus Award
• Winner of Commonwealth Literature Prize
• Winner of Welsh Arts Council International Writer's Prize

Adaptation

The novel has been adapted several times in different media such as audiobook, album songs, film, graphic novel, radio shows with BBC and CBO, stage shows (play, opera, and ballet), and Television. Hulu has produced a television series based on the novel starring Elisabeth Moss as Offred which was first released in 2017, the second season was aired in 2018, the third season premiered in June 2019. Hulu announced season 4 which will consist of 10 episodes, and it was to start production in March 2020 but was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic.

About the Author

Margaret Eleanor Atwood (born November 18, 1939) is a Canadian poet, novelist, literary critic, essayist, teacher, environmental activist, and inventor. She was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and currently residing in Toronto, Ontario. She has published 18 books of poetry, 18 novels, 11 books of non-fiction, 9 collections of short fiction, 8 children's books, and 2 graphic novels, as well as a number of small press editions of both poetry and fiction. Her works encompass a variety of themes including gender and identity, religion and myth, the power of language, climate change, and power politics. Many of her poems are inspired by myths and fairy tales.

Atwood has won numerous awards and honors for her writing, including the Booker Prize, Arthur C. Clark Award, Governor General's Award, Franz Kafka Prize, Princess of Asturias Awards, the National Book Critics, and PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Awards. A number of her works have been adapted for film and television, increasing her exposure. She is a founder of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Writer's Trust of Canada. She is also a Senior Fellow of Massey College, Toronto. 

She is also the inventor of the LongPen device and associated technologies that facilitate remote robotic writing of documents.

Margaret Atwood

Link to the review of the sequel of The Handmaid's Tale: 

The Testament

https://bookreviewsbyarti.blogspot.com/2020/09/the-testaments.html

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Rating: 4.2/5

Author: Margaret Atwood

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (2nd Edition), McClelland and Stewart (Original)

Publishing Date: April 25, 2017 (Second Edition), 1985 (Original)

Edition Language: English

Genre: Dystopian novel, Speculative fiction, Tragedy, Literary Criticism & Theory

ISBN-10: 1328879941

ISBN-13: 978-1328879943

Pages: 311 (Hardcover)

 

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Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan

The Original Cover Page

Description

The Pilgrim's Progress from this World, to That Which Is to Come, is a 1678 Christian allegory written by John Bunyan. It is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious, theological fiction in English literature. It has been marked as the first novel written in English. It has been translated into more than 200 languages and has never been out of print.

According to recent scholars such as Roger Sharrock, Bunyan began his work in the Bedfordshire county prison during lengthy imprisonment from 1660 to 1672 in the course of violations of the Conventicle Act of 1664 which prohibited the holding of religious services outside the auspices of the established Church of England. Further, he mentioned that Bunyan had started working on 'Pilgrim's Progress' right after his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

To be claimed as the first English literature, the 'Pilgrim's Progress'  was written in satirical prose with Bible verses which was not so easy to read and understand by contemporary readers. Over the years, it has been adopted and re-written by many contemporary writers. The text is tweaked just enough to make it readable for the young and the old.

The narrator often disguised as something that would help him or try to pull him down, evil accompanies Christian on his journey to the Celestial City. As you walk with him, you will begin to identify today's many religious pitfalls. These are presented by men such as Pliable, who turns back at the Slough of Despond; and Ignorance, who believes he's a true follower of Christ when he's really only trusting in himself. Each character represented in this allegory is intentionally and profoundly accurate in its depiction of what we see all around us, and unfortunately, what we too often see in ourselves. But while Christian is injured and nearly killed, he eventually prevails to the end. So can you.

The best of this version is the Bible verses added to the text. The original Pilgrim's Progress listed the Bible verse references, but the verses themselves are so impactful when tied to the scenes in this allegory, that they are now included within the text of this book. Youngsters, in particular, will be drawn to the original illustrations included in these wonderful classics.

About the Author

John Bunyan was born in November 1628, in Elstow, England. He was a celebrated English writer and Puritan preacher, best remembered as the author of the Christian allegory The Pilgrim's Progress (1678)- A book which was the most characteristic expression of the Puritan religious outlook. In addition to The Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them orated as sermons. His other works include doctrinal and controversial writing; a spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding (1666), and the allegory The Holy War (1682).

Bunyan attained rudimentary schooling in his village Elstow, near Bedford. At the age of sixteen, he joined the Parliamentary Army during the first stage of the English Civil War. After three years in the army, he returned to Elstow and took up the trade of tinker, which he had learned from his father. He got interested in religion after his marriage. He first attended the parish church and then joined the Bedford Meeting 'a nonconformist group in Bedford', and then became a preacher.

After the restoration of the monarch, when the freedom of non-conformists was curtailed, Bunyan was arrested for refusing to give up preaching. During 12 years of jail, he wrote a spiritual autobiography and his most famous book The Pilgrim's Progress, which was not published until some years after his release.

John Bunyan 

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Series: Bunyan Updated Classics (Book-1)

Rating: 4.8/10

Author: John Bunyan

Publisher: Aneko Press (second edition) 

Publishing Date: January 15, 2015 (second edition)

Edition Language: English

Genre: Literature, Christian Classics & Allegories (Books), Classic Literature & Fiction

ISBN-10: 1622452399

ISBN-13: 978-1622452392

Pages: 384

 

The Ramayana by R. K. Narayan

                                 

Description

This version of The Ramayana was written by an Indian novelist R. K. Narayan, which was published in 1972. Narayan's The Ramayana is the crisp and simple version of the epic saga of Hindu Mythology. This particular re-told tale is based on the Tamil version written by an eleventh-century poet Kamban and also, the cover page contains the drawing of the same version. 

The Ramayana tells the story of Lord Ram, a man who is an avatar (incarnation) of the Hindu god Vishnu. He is called 'Pouroshottam (Uttam Pourush/The best man)' with all the godly qualities of Lord Vishnu in the body of a man. The epic is a sweeping tale of abduction, battle, and courtship played out in a universe of deities and demons. The two ideologies or morals that follow almost every character are Honor and Loyalty. Even though honoring one's promises and behaving loyally often has disastrous short-term consequences for the characters. They overwhelmingly choose to follow through with their promises, which later results in long-term success.

It is familiar almost to every Indian. Although the Sanskrit original was composed by Valmiki around the fourth century BC which consists of 24,000 verses and 500 chapters. Many poets have produced countless versions in different languages. Each storyteller has offered a slightly different version with the intent to accommodate the tale to one's demands and preferences.

Narayan's version of Ramayana, which consists of a mere 150 pages and 14 chapters, reflects a deeper analysis of the character of Rama. He believes that Ram was wrong to ask Sita to give Agnipariksha in course of staying at Ravan's Lanka after being abducted.

Readers can be keen on spiritual wisdom and the advent of the thrilling tale-the ancient war between good and evil or deities and demons. A luminous saga made accessible to new generations of readers. 

About the Author

R. K. Narayan was born in Madras, South India, and educated there at Maharaja's College in Mysore. His first novel Swami and Friends (1935) and its successor The Bachelor of Arts (1937) are both set in the enchanting fictional territory of Malgudi. Other Malgudi novels are The Dark Room (1938), The English Teacher (1945), Mr. Sampath (1949), The Financial Expert (1952), The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961), The Vendor of Sweets (1967), The Painter of Signs (1977), A Tiger for Malgudi (1983), Talkative Man (1986). 

He has five collections of short stories as well: A Horse and Two Goats, An Astrologer's Day and the Other Stories, Lawley Road, Under the Banyan Tree, and Malgudi Days. He has published a travel book Emerald Route; three collections of essays: A Writer's Nightmare, Next Sunday and Reluctant Guru; Three books on the Indian epics, and a volume of memoirs: My Days.

His novel The Guide (1958) won him the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, India's highest literary honor. He was awarded in 1980 the A. C. Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature and also, in 1981 he was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. 

R. K. Narayan

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Rating: 4.5/5
Author: R.K. Narayan
Publisher: Chatto and Windus
Publishing Date: 1972
Language: English
Genre: Mythology. saga & legends
ISBN-10: 0143039679
ISBN-13: 978-0143039679
Format: Paperback
Pages: 192

Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi

     

 

Description 

Celestial Bodies, which was originally published in 2010, is the work of an Omani writer Jokha Alharthi. This the first novel from Gulf to be shortlisted and win the Man Booker Prize for 2019. It is originally written in Arabic and the first-ever book by a female author from Gulf to be translated into English. Celestial Bodies made its own place in 'major international writers' shelf' in the United States.

The novel takes its reader on a journey in the village of al-Awafi in Omann, we encounter three sisters: Mayya, who marries after a heartbreak; Asma, who marries from a sense of duty' and Khawla, who chooses to refuse all offers and awaits a reunion with the man she loves, who has emigrated to Canada. 

These three women and their families, their losses, and loves unspool beautifully against a backdrop of a rapidly changing Oman, a country evolving from a traditional, slave-Owning society into its complex. present. Through the Sisters, we glimpse a society in all its degrees, from the very poorest of the local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth. 

In an introductory note the translator, Marilyn Booth, sets out the book's key theme, built around the pressure on three generations of an Omani family as a result of social change. 

But it's harder to make out these themes in the novel itself, perhaps because of the complex structure. 

The narratives alternate between a third-person viewpoint and the first-person voice of Abdallah, a married businessman haunted by his father's cruelty. The stories of many others are woven in, making the shape of the book more a tangled skein than a linear progression. 

Frequent reference to the family tree that opens the book is needed, but cannot straighten out bewildering inter-relationships. Slavery was only outlawed in Oman in 1970 and its dark complexities affect the families at the heart of the novel. While there are some frustrations for the reader to overcome, the glimpses into a culture relatively little known in the west are fascinating. 

This winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is "an innovative reimagining of the family saga... Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of secret".--The New York Times Book Review 

About the Author

Jokha Alharthi was born in Oman in July 1978. She is the author of two previous collections of short fiction, a children's book, and three novels in Arabic. Fluent in English, she completed a Ph.D. in Classical Arabic Poetry in Edinburgh and teaches at Sultan Qaboos University in Muscat. She has been shortlisted for Shaikh Zayed Award for Young Writers and her short stories have been published in English, German, Italian, Korean and Serbian. She lives in Oman.

Jokha Alharthi

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Rating: 3.9/5

Author: Jokha AlHarthi

Publisher: Catapult (First Edition)

Publishing Date: October 8, 2019 (First Edition)

Edition Language: English

Genre: Sister Fiction, Coming of Age Fiction, Cultural Heritage Fiction

ISBN-10: 1948226944

ISBN-13: 978-1948226943

Pages: 256