Contents • • • • • • • • • • • Plot [ ] In the near future, war rages across the Republic of Gilead—formerly the United States of America—and pollution has rendered 99% of the population sterile. Kate is a woman who attempts to emigrate to Canada with her husband and daughter. As they take a dirt road, the Gilead Border Guard orders them to turn back or they will open fire. Kate's husband uses an automatic rifle to draw the fire, telling Kate to run, but he gets shot. Kate gets captured, while their daughter wanders off into the back country, confused and unaccompanied. The authorities take Kate to a training facility with several other women, where she and her companions receive training to become Handmaids—concubines for one of the privileged but barren couples who run the country's religious fundamentalist regime. Although she resists being indoctrinated into the cult of the Handmaids, which mixes orthodoxy with scripted group chanting and ritualized violence, Kate is soon assigned to the home of 'the Commander' (Fred) and of his cold, inflexible wife, Serena Joy. There she is named 'Offred'—'of Fred'. Her role as the Commander's latest concubine is emotionless. She lies between Serena Joy's legs while being raped by the Commander in the collective hope that she will bear them a child. Kate continually longs for her earlier life, but she is haunted by nightmares of her husband's death and of her daughter's disappearance. A doctor tells her that many of Gilead's male leaders are as sterile as their wives. Serena Joy desperately wants a baby, so she persuades Kate to risk the punishment for fornication—death by hanging—in order to be fertilized by another man who may make her pregnant, and consequently, spare her life. In exchange for Kate agreeing to this, Serena Joy provides information to Kate that her daughter is alive, and shows as proof a recent photograph of her living in the household of another Commander. However, Kate is told she can never see her daughter.
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