Margaret Atwood's new novel, The Testaments, will be available in the U.S. on September 10. Don't forget to add it to your Want to Read shelf. Be sure to also read more of our exclusive author interviews and get more great book recommendations.

For having one of literature’s most famous cliffhangers, The Handmaid’s Tale ends on a taunt of a last line: “Are there any questions?”Oh, have there been questions. Margaret Atwood has heard them all. She published her groundbreaking novel in 1985 and has watched the book become a classic—as well as a movie, an opera, a ballet, an award-winning television series , and the launch pad for an entire subgenre of feminist dystopian fiction Set in a totalitarian regime in a near-future New England, The Handmaid’s Tale is narrated by Offred, a woman forced to live as a concubine. Her harrowing tale culminates in a leap of faith. She steps into a van, not knowing if salvation or ruin awaits.So what was Offred’s fate? For decades, Atwood wouldn’t say. Readers came to terms with the ambiguity, though some could console themselves with the continuation of Offred’s story as depicted in the ongoing TV adaptation.Then a literary bombshell of an announcement : In November 2018, Atwood announced she would be releasing a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale The Testaments would pick up the story 15 years later with the testimonies of three female narrators from Gilead. It hits bookshelves September 10.Of course, we wouldn’t dare to give any spoilers here. Instead Goodreads editor Hayley Igarashi talked with Atwood about how current events inspired her return to Gilead, why she told The Handmaid’s Tale TV writers not to kill off Aunt Lydia, and what, despite her “Prophet of Dystopia” nickname, makes her optimistic about the future.People have been basically trying to kidnap it. Let’s see what happens! It’ll be quite the event.No, I did not. And over the years, people have said, “Are you going to write a sequel? Please write a sequel!” And I always said no because sequels, to them and to me, meant the continuation of the story of Offred in her voice. And I would not have been able to do that. So I said no to that.But as time went on and we started moving not away from Gilead but toward Gilead, I saw there was a different way of approaching the story, which was how does Gilead fall apart. Or how does it begin to fall apart, because we know from The Handmaid’s Tale that it does end. We just don’t know how.I do have a lot of my handwritten pages and notes from my creative thinking stage, but unfortunately I didn’t date them. I’d say that was around 2015 and 2016.By 2017, the ideas were all pretty much there. I sent half a page to my publishers in February 2017 saying what the book was going to be.] I’ll take that! If they had said “soporific and soothing,” I wouldn’t have been quite so pleased.About the same. [] It was terrifying and exhilarating partly because who knew what was going to happen next? I mean, not only in the book but in my life. It was all quite a roller coaster.One happens to be part of the second generation of people who grow up in a totalitarian society. The first generation are the founders. They’re usually possessed of burning true belief or an extreme desire for power.What happens to their children? Once the structures of the totalitarian society are in place, how do young people move through them?And then we have the Aunts, who are women in positions of power over other women. How do people in totalitarian regimes get their position? Is it not true that groups wishing to suppress other groups usually raise up a group from within the oppressed group to do the oppression? Historically, that’s been the case.Well, they don’t know the handmaids. They don’t have personal relationships with them. The handmaids are sort of like sacred monsters to the younger women.That’s how it would be. That’s how it has been. If you have a privileged position in the hierarchy of descending position, you want to keep your position, not risk it to help people who are not at that level.I’m quite optimistic about the under-18-year-olds right now. They are not sitting on their hands. Particularly the Extinction Rebellion folks. They know that we are in a serious position, and they are taking it seriously.They’re making politicians take it seriously, too. Because although they may not be able to vote today, they’re going to be voting in a couple of years.And even young Republicans are telling old Republicans: “Come out of your shell.” Because voters are now concerned. All that propaganda politicians did in the 1990s may have worked temporarily, but now that the Arctic is on fire and a great big section of the American heartland is flooded, people want these things taken seriously.You know, I’ve heard that talked about! I’ve seen it happening in nonfiction books—people giving ideas about how the future could be different in a positive way.If you’re interested in that, the best place I could refer you to is a website called Project Drawdown as well as the book Drawdown . They lay out all the things we’re doing now that have the effect of drawing down carbon out of the atmosphere, or not releasing it in the first place. It’s not just all about oil. Some of it is about soil. Organic soil just holds a lot more carbon and water.And then there are always unexpected things that happen that change things. For instance, all the smoke pouring out of the tundra that’s on fire . That makes things harder.How much of a feedback loop are we in, and how much do we have to do to get out of it? That is the burning question. Pun intended!They were writing seasons 2 and 3 when I was writing the book. [] It was sort of an in-tandem operation.I did tell Bruce Miller, who is the showrunner: “You can’t kill Aunt Lydia! Hands off Aunt Lydia! She must live.”And he said, “I wasn’t going to kill her anyway.”They were a very devoted team, and they followed the first rule, which is this: Nothing goes in that doesn’t have a precedent in real-life history. They do their research.In the show, Offred skirts along the line pretty closely. I’m pretty sure Hitler would have killed her by now. But because she’s got some complicit-on-her-side things, she’s managing to survive.Well, it was thrilling to watch that scene get rehearsed. Because you see what a big difference a couple of small changes can make. Because television is very up close and visible. Nothing in it is non-specific. You can’t avoid seeing everything. Just a different expression of the face or a different gesture can completely change the meaning.I got to see Ann Dowd in action. What a performance. And I had Elisabeth Moss say, “Hit me harder!” [] “Give me a real smack!”And I told her, “No, no, I don’t want to hurt you. Let someone else do it!”A few things. The ongoing bird conservation and conservation in general. And the work of Equality Now after #MeToo Different kind of technology as well. I’m also keen on—and am an investor in— Recompose , a company that composts your corpse, which is carbon beneficial. You get put into a pod and you come out as compost. No fossil fuels used.I think they sound pretty good! They promise tasteful facilities. They’re in Seattle. They began this thing called the Urban Death Project, which immediately caught my attention. They changed their name to Recompose to be more user-friendly.Which, by the way, is what my publishers did with my book on writing—from the title “Negotiating with the Dead” to On Writers and Writing . They said to maybe get rid of the “D” word. [] It puts people off.I never really speculate about what I might do in the future because every time I have speculated I’ve been wrong.And then if I speculate out loud, people say, “You said you were going to do that. Why didn’t you do it?”I tell them it’s just not working, and then they want to know why it’s not working. I say it’s because it just didn’t feel right, and they want to know why it didn’t feel right.I can get sucked down that rabbit hole pretty quickly. A lot of times you don’t know why it’s not working. You can just feel it. And at that point you put it in a drawer. Stephen King has just reissued his book on writing, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft . He says much the same thing. Sometimes it’s just not working. A lot of it is touchy, feely stuff.Yes, it is important. Those writers have to make up their own minds about the world. They have to make up their own minds about the books they want to write.There is a whole generation now of female authors writing dystopias, and they sometimes say to me, “I read The Handmaid’s Tale in high school.” [And what did I read in high school? I read 1984 , which made a big impression on me. I also read Fahrenheit 451 and similar books of that kind.I think we are quite influenced by what we read in high school. But it takes us a while to acquire the skills and craft to create our own.Learn to type! [] It would’ve saved so much time, but of course, one didn’t. And it would’ve been a great help if I had known how totype. But I didn’t, and that’s just where we are.I also would say to myself: Why don’t you make your handwriting more legible so other people can type your manuscripts. Way too late for that now!I sometimes tell writers to do the back exercises now because otherwise you’re going to be hunched over the keyboard. And you will get neck pain. [] It’s all very practical.