The Handmaid's Tale
By Margaret Atwood
 
First UK edition, first impression: London: Jonathan Cape, 1986.
 
Original black cloth, spine lettered in gilt with the Cape device at the foot. With the original pictorial dust jacket, illustration by Fred Marcellino, unclipped and priced £9.95 net.
 
A very good copy or better, the binding square and firm; some tanning to the edges with spotting to the top edge, the contents clean throughout.
 
The dust jacket very good and unclipped, with some moderate wear to the top edge and a small area of light browning to the top of the upper and lower flaps. Marcellino's design - two Handmaids in red, one behind the other at the foot of a curving grey brick wall beneath a band of turquoise sky - is unfaded and the black lettering strong; overall presenting well.
 
Atwood's sixth novel, set in the Republic of Gilead, was first published in Canada by McClelland and Stewart in 1985 and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin the following year; this is the first British edition. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1986, and in 1987 it took the first Arthur C. Clarke Award — a prize for the best science fiction novel published for the first time by a British publisher in the preceding year, and it was this Cape edition that qualified the novel for it. Volker Schlöndorff's film followed in 1990, from a screenplay by Harold Pinter and with Natasha Richardson as Offred, and a television adaptation began in 2017.