How do you save the world from monsters if no one will admit they exist?She stumbled backwards, her eyes wide, as the figure started coming out of the canvas... She tried to be brave. Well, she said, her hands only a little shaky, at least tell me what I should call you.

... Well, little girl, it replied, I suppose you can call me Pet. There are no more monsters anymore, or so the children in the city of Lucille are taught.

With doting parents and a best friend named Redemption, Jam has grown...

The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one function: to breed. If she deviates, she will, like dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.

Brilliantly conceived and executed, this powerful evocation of twenty-first century America gives full rein to Margaret Atwood's devastating irony, wit and astute perception.