Image © Beck’s Books

Happy Fall everyone! It’s the perfect time of year to curl up with a hot beverage and haunting book. So, for this month’s selection we’ve gone with the theme: {Ghost Stories}.

We had a long list to choose from… but there was one classic that made its way to the top: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Surprisingly, none of us have read this highly acclaimed novel, named on such Goodreads lists as: Best Books Ever and The Most Disturbing Books Ever Written.

Published in 1986 by award-winning, Canadian author Margaret Atwood, this is the story of a dystopian United States set in the near future when a totalitarian Christian theocracy has overthrown the government. In this disturbing world people are segregated by categories and made to dress according to their station. The bodies of those who rebel swing from the walls that surround the new world. This new world is a haunting look at humanity’s capacity to impose a social control so disturbing, so all-consuming, that the citizens wander as ghosts of their former selves.

Some might categorize this as science fiction, but Atwood insists none of her books are sci-fi. “In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, she says that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have already happened, so they can’t be science fiction, which is ‘fiction in which things happen that are not possible today.‘” It’s this very idea that makes this such a scary story. There might not be ghosts or haunted houses… but a world like this seems an even more frightening reality.

We hope you’ll read along with us and share your progress/thoughts with us on Instagram or Twitter using #BooklyMark!