The Booker Prize 2020

Margaret Atwood (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)

More than fifteen years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, the theocratic regime of the Republic of Gilead maintains its grip on power, but there are signs it is beginning to rot from within. At this crucial moment, the lives of three radically different women converge, with potentially explosive results.

Two have grown up as part of the first generation to come of age in the new order. The testimonies of these two young women are joined by a third voice: a woman who wields power through the ruthless accumulation and deployment of secrets.

As Atwood unfolds The Testaments, she opens up the innermost workings of Gilead as each woman is forced to come to terms with who she is, and how far she will go for what she believes.

‘Dear Readers: Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.' Margaret Atwood

Bernardine Evaristo (Penguin General, Hamish Hamilton)

Welcome to Newcastle, 1905. Ten-year-old Grace is an orphan dreaming of the mysterious African father she will never meet.

Cornwall, 1953. Winsome is a young bride, recently arrived from Barbados, realising the man she married might be a fool.

London, 1980. Amma is the fierce queen of her squatters' palace, ready to Smash The Patriarchy with a new kind of feminist theatre.

Oxford, 2008. Carole is rejecting her cultural background (Nigeria by way of Peckham) to blend in at her posh university.

Northumberland, 2017. Morgan, who used to be Megan, is visiting Hattie who's in her nineties, who used to be young and strong, who fights to remain independent, and who still misses Slim every day.

Welcome to Britain and twelve very different people - mostly women, mostly black - who call it home. Teeming with life and crackling with energy, Girl, Woman, Other follows them across the miles and down the years. With vivid originality, irrepressible wit and sly wisdom, Bernardine Evaristo presents a gloriously new kind of history for this old country: ever-dynamic, ever-expanding and utterly irresistible.