The three decades between The Handmaid’s Tale and Margaret Atwood’s much anticipated follow-up makes the wait for George RR Martin’s The Winds of Winter seem brief

Those lucky enough to get an advance copy of Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments – though not those who got an early look thanks to Amazon’s embarrassing faux pas – received them in a package stamped with the message: “All things come to she who waits.” Well, quite; but 34 years is a long time to hang on for a sequel, by anyone’s measure.

It’s debatable whether Atwood would have ever returned to Gilead but for two things: the hit TV adaptation of her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale, and that Donald Trump’s administration seems to be using the original as some sort of guidebook to run the US.

A long time between books, certainly – there are members of Congress who weren’t yet born when The Handmaid’s Tale was published – but by no means the biggest gap in publishing history.

So let’s look at some of the longest waits readers have had for sequels. To save anyone going to any trouble in the comments, let’s agree not to include the Old and New Testaments (God’s, not Atwood’s), nor make any unseemly jokes about George RR Martin going for the record with the oft-delayed The Winds of Winter, the next book in his A Song of Ice And Fire cycle (a short eight years so far).

We can certainly point the finger at Stephen King, though. His third novel The Shining was published in 1977, about the slow descent into supernatural madness by recovering alcoholic and struggling writer Jack Torrance, who takes his family to live in a deserted hotel where he has become the off-season caretaker. The sequel, Doctor Sleep, was published 36 years later in 2013, concentrating on Torrance’s son Danny and his ability to tap into the paranormal world, or “shining”. Of the 36-year wait, King told the Guardian that he’d always found himself wondering what happened to Danny after The Shining: “And I thought, well, let’s find out.”

King had well-documented issues with alcohol, as does Danny in Doctor Sleep, which served as a way of exploring addiction with the benefit of hindsight. In a similar vein, John Updike took 24 years to write a follow-up to his 1984 novel The Witches of Eastwick. Updike said he wrote The Widows of Eastwick because, “Taking those women into old age would be a way of writing about old age, my old age.”

For many writers of advanced years, revisiting characters they created in their youth is a way of adding context to both their writing and personal lives. Updike was 75 when The Widows of Eastwick was published, and died the following year. Likewise, Joseph Heller began writing his war satire Catch-22 in 1953 when he was 30; it was eventually published in 1961 and was followed by Closing Time 33 years later, catching up with Yossarian in 1990s New York. He told the New York Times that, at the age of 71, Closing Time was “My summing-up, yes. Not my swan song.” It was his last novel before his death in December 1999.

Perhaps the novel with the longest wait – and the most controversy – is Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. There was great excitement in 2015 when it was announced the manuscript had been discovered among Lee’s belongings. For decades it was assumed To Kill a Mockingbird was her only work. But claims emerged that Watchman was actually an earlier draft of Mockingbird, not a true sequel, and dark questions were raised about Lee’s ability to consent to its publication due to her age and declining health. She died aged 89 in February 2016, just a few months after the publication of her second novel, which came 55 years after her first.

Other long gaps include the 49 years between Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (1957) and Farewell Summer, the quarter-century it took Bret Easton Ellis to revisit his debut novel Less Than Zero with 2010’s Imperial Bedrooms and — to make George RR Martin feel a little better — the 17 years it took JRR Tolkien to follow up The Hobbit with The Lord of the Rings. Who among today’s authors are eyeing up their early works with plans for a sequel? I for one look forward to The Pensioner on the Train in 2044.