The Republic of Gilead offers Offred only one option: to breed.

If she deviates, she will, like all dissenters, be hanged at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness.

But even a repressive state cannot obliterate desire - neither Offred's nor that of the two men on which her future hangs.

A brilliant and astutely perceived evocation of twenty-first-century America.